You can't fight a war on voting rights by compromising

[marmar]

You can’t fight a war on voting rights by compromising
By Jeffrey C. Billman


(Detroit Metro Times) By the end of the 19th century, Wilmington was North Carolina's most populous city, and as a shipping hub, among its most prosperous, too. It was an unusual place: majority Black, with a thriving Black middle class and — most important — a multiracial government.

"This was a primal threat to white supremacy," the journalist David Zucchino told me last year.

As Zucchino details in his book Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy, two days after the November 1898 election — which state Democrats won through fraud, violence, and fearmongering about "Black beasts" raping white women — a mob of more than 2,000 white men descended on Wilmington and executed the only successful coup d'état in American history.

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And so last Thursday, surrounded by white men in suits and seated under a painting of a slave plantation, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed the most blatant attack on Black voting rights in a generation, while a Black woman lawmaker was arrested for knocking on the door to the room where Kemp was signing the bill.

These are optics the Republican Party will come to regret.

Kemp narrowly won his election in 2018 against Stacey Abrams, a Black woman, after — as Georgia secretary of state — he engaged in egregious voter suppression. The law he signed, which reversed rules the Republican legislature had previously enacted, exists because Black people used those rules to defeat his political allies. .............(more)

https://www.metrotimes.com/detroit/you-cant-fight-a-war-on-voting-rights-by-compromising/Content?oid=26783675#.YGSGnSLbWe4.link