Racial Disenfranchisement Quotes

The 3rd leg of the strategy for GOP political supremacy has been to suppress the vote of the Democrat’s most loyal base: African Americans. On the fallacious pretext of addressing voter fraud, Republican officials in more than two dozen states introduced and passed new voting laws that that restrict voting. The most immediate impact of these laws has been to disproportionately disenfranchise Black, Latino and young voters.

The great majority of negroes in the South who do not vote, do not care to vote and would not know for what to vote if they could.

If I may seem a bit moved about this, it is because of the hell I have been through because I am a Negro, and I think this committee ought to show a little more consideration for the democracy that Negroes are denied .... the menace that ought to be paid attention to is the menace where 14 or 15 million Negroes have no place to turn to feel that they are protected.

Blacks—across the economic and ideological spectrum—often feel astonishingly vulnerable, of accusations of disloyalty to race.

The Legislature, which was elected under the Constitution framed and supported by colored men, declared that a man having more than an eighth of African blood in his veins was ineligible to office or a seat in the Legislature of the State of Georgia.

It could be clearly proved that by a practical nullification [by the South] of the Fifteenth Amendment the Republicans have for several years been deprived of a majority in both the House and Senate. The failure of the South to faithfully observe the Fifteenth Amendment is the cause of the failure of all efforts towards complete pacification. It is on this hook that the bloody shirt now hangs.

The history of blackness is also a history of erasure.

I spent many years working for voting rights, but we still see sophisticated efforts, led by white officials, to disenfranchise black voters in local and national elections.

There are no black conservatives. Oh, there are neoconservatives with black skin, but they lack any claim to blackness other than the biological. They have forgotten their roots.

That conclusion is inescapable, given the well-established evidence that voter-ID laws don't disenfranchise minorities or reduce minority voting, and in many instances enhance it, despite claims to the contrary by Mr. Holder and his allies. As more states adopt such laws, the left has railed against them with increasing fury, even invoking the specter of the Jim Crow era to describe electoral safeguards common to most nations, including in the Third World.