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      The Supreme Court Finally Strikes the Right Balance on Voting Rights

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      One of the most important realities of American life is this: No nation can fully undo the effects of 345 years of state-sanctioned bigotry — from slavery to Jim Crow — in 59 years. The time period between the arrival of the first slaves on colonial shores in 1619 and the abolition of legalized discrimination with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 is simply too long, the discrimination too ingrained and the distortion of society too great to wave the wand of legal and cultural reform and quickly realize the dream of American equality.At the same time, there’s another vital American reality: Through grit, determination and immense courage, Black Americans and other marginalized communities have made immense gains, the hearts of countless white Americans have indeed changed and America is a far better and fairer place than it was in even the recent past.And now, at last, in the vital area of voting rights, Supreme Court authority reflects both these truths.Earlier this month, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in a case called Allen v. Milligan that surprised many legal observers by striking down an Alabama redistricting map that would have preserved the state’s recent tradition of maintaining only one majority Black district out of seven in a state with a 27 percent Black population.Voting in Alabama is extremely racially polarized. For example, in the 2020 presidential election, 91 percent of Black voters in the state voted for Joe Biden, while only 20 percent of white voters did so. In practice, this persistent polarization, combined with GOP-drawn district maps, has meant that Black voters were able to elect only one of Alabama’s seven congressional representatives.Voting rights jurisprudence is extremely complicated, but I’ll do my best to be succinct and accurate in describing both the issues and one key reason for the surprise: The author of the majority opinion in Allen — which, again, generally cheered liberals and disappointed conservatives — was Chief Justice John Roberts. Ten years ago, he had written one of the most contentious Supreme Court opinions of the 21st century, Shelby County v. Holder.In Shelby County, a sharply divided 5-to-4 court gutted key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by striking down elements of Section 4 that required the federal government to “preclear” or preapprove changes to the voting laws of a limited number of American states, counties and townships, essentially placing these jurisdictions under federal supervision to prevent them from enacting (or, more precisely, re-enacting) discriminatory voting laws. Each of the jurisdictions had an especially pernicious history of racial discrimination in voting.The states included seven of the old Confederacy, plus Alaska and Arizona, as well as a handful of counties and towns in other states (including the counties of New York, Bronx and Kings, or Brooklyn, in New York City, each of which had extraordinarily low Hispanic voter registration rates as well as a legacy of English literacy tests). In 1966, the Supreme Court had upheld the Voting Rights Act in an 8-to-1 decision, holding that “exceptional conditions can justify legislative measures not otherwise appropriate.”In 2013, however, the Roberts court decided that some of those “exceptional conditions” no longer pertained. As Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “Census Bureau data indicate that African American voter turnout has come to exceed white voter turnout in five of the six States originally covered by §5, with a gap in the sixth State of less than one half of one percent.”The decision didn’t gut the entire act. Section 2, which prohibits “denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote” on the basis of race, remained in force. But the meaning of Section 2 has been a subject of intense debate. Gerrymandering has been at the heart of that debate.If a state “cracks” a Black community (i.e., splits it apart into multiple districts) or “packs” one (i.e., concentrates its voters into supermajority districts) in a manner that leaves Black voters with diminished voting power, does that violate the act? It certainly does if it’s done with an explicit racial motive.But what if the state claims that the motive isn’t racial, but partisan? The Supreme Court has long granted states greater leeway to tilt the partisan playing field, and in a 2019 case, Rucho v. Common Cause, it seemed to throw up its hands entirely, holding that complaints against partisan gerrymandering weren’t “justiciable.” In other words, the solution to partisan gerrymandering abuses should be located in the political branches of government, not the courts.This ruling potentially created an immense opening for disguised racial gerrymanders, especially in heavily racially polarized states. Even worse, Alabama wanted the Supreme Court to modify existing precedent to give states even greater leeway in the face of claims of race discrimination. If Alabama prevailed, a Republican-dominated state could crack or pack Black communities and say that it was done not because the communities were Black, but because they were Democratic. Though the result — less Black representation in Congress — would be the same, the motive would be legal.Or would it? In Allen, Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the three Democratic-appointed justices said no, not always. Under highly racially polarized voting conditions, Supreme Court authority will require the creation of majority-minority districts when, to quote Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence, “(i) a State’s redistricting map cracks or packs a large and ‘geographically compact’ minority population and (ii) a plaintiff’s proposed alternative map and proposed majority-minority district are ‘reasonably configured.’”To translate the legalese: States and regions that are highly racially polarized can’t fracture or compress minority voting districts when reasonably drawn alternative maps would more closely maintain the relative power of minority voters. If anything, by reaffirming and clarifying existing precedents in the face of substantial legal doubt, the Court strengthened Section 2.I know that’s a lot to take in, but here’s where things get interesting. If you peruse recent exit polls, you’ll quickly observe that many of the old preclearance states retain exactly the kind of racially polarized voting patterns that, thanks to the Allen ruling, can trigger judicial skepticism. I quoted Alabama’s voting stats above. But what about other old preclearance states? In 2020, 77 percent of white Louisiana voters voted for Donald Trump, and 88 percent of Black voters voted for Joe Biden. In Mississippi, 81 percent of white voters voted for Trump and 94 percent of Black voters voted for Biden. In South Carolina, 69 percent of white voters voted for Trump and 92 percent of Black voters voted for Biden.While I certainly won’t argue that most white voters in those states are racist (indeed, a supermajority of voters in South Carolina supported Tim Scott, a Black Republican, for Senate), those numbers are not the American norm. Racial polarization exists more broadly, but not to the same extent. Nationally, for example, 55 percent of white voters voted for Trump, while 92 percent of Black voters voted for Biden. In some states, such as California and New York, Joe Biden received a majority of white and Black votes.Racially polarized voting isn’t proof of racism in any given voter’s heart. But it is part of the legacy of American bigotry and racial divisions. By preserving and clarifying the core of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — especially when voting is highly racially polarized — and by rejecting Alabama’s effort to limit Section 2, Chief Justice Roberts has subtly limited the reach of his own precedent. Now, thanks to Allen, many preclearance states will face greater scrutiny — unless and until their own cultural and political changes bring them closer to broader American partisan norms.That’s the legal impact, but there’s a cultural impact as well. In a tangible way, Chief Justice Roberts, along with Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Kavanaugh and Ketanji Brown Jackson brought the court’s precedent closer in line with the nation’s reality. Our country has made real progress in addressing racist violations of voting rights. The ruling in Shelby County reflected that encouraging truth. At the same time, our nation still hasn’t cleansed itself of racism or fully addressed the legacy of bigotry. The court’s holding in Allen acknowledged that sad fact.The law does not always align with the facts of American life, but in this case, the Supreme Court has brought it closer to proper balance. The Court is an embattled institution, yet it still retains some bipartisan wisdom. America has come so very far, so we must not despair as if all is lost. America still has so far to go, so we must not celebrate as if all is won.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Alabama discriminated against Black voters, US supreme court rules

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      Alabama discriminated against Black voters when it drew its seven congressional districts last year, the supreme court has ruled, a decision that is a major victory for the Voting Rights Act (VRA).The decision was 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joining the court’s three liberal justices in the opinion. Writing for the majority of the court, Roberts noted the court was rejecting Alabama’s effort to get it to rewrite its longstanding interpretation of section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which outlaws voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race. The decision means that section 2 of the law, one of its last remaining powerful provisions, will remain intact.“The heart of these cases is not about the law as it exists. It is about Alabama’s attempt to remake our §2 jurisprudence anew,” Roberts wrote. “We find Alabama’s new approach to §2 compelling neither in theory nor in practice. We accordingly decline to recast our §2 case law as Alabama requests.”The decision was an unexpected outcome from Roberts and the court, both of whom have significantly hollowed out the Voting Rights Act in recent years. As a young lawyer in the justice department in the 1980s, Roberts argued for narrowing the interpretation of section 2. The court has rarely sided with voting rights litigants who allege voting discrimination.The decision in the case, Allen v Milligan, means that Alabama will have to draw its congressional map to include a second majority-Black district. Black voters currently comprise a majority of the voting age population in just one district, despite making up a quarter of the state’s population.“This decision is a crucial win against the continued onslaught of attacks on voting rights,” Deuel Ross, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund who argued on behalf of the plaintiffs, said in a statement. “Alabama attempted to rewrite federal law by saying race had no place in redistricting. But because of the state’s sordid and well-documented history of racial discrimination, race must be used to remedy that past and ensure communities of color are not boxed out of the electoral process.”The ruling also is a boon to similar cases in Louisiana, Texas and Georgia, where litigants currently are suing to require the drawing of additional majority-minority districts. “This precedent also lays a foundation for fair map decisions in our other Section 2 cases,” said Marina Jenkins, the executive director of the National Redistricting Foundation, a Democratic-aligned group that is involved in those cases.Alabama could have easily drawn a second majority-Black district, the challengers in the case argued. They offered several sample maps with possible configurations of how to do so. Last year, a three-judge panel unanimously agreed with that argument and ordered the state to do so. The panel, which included two judges appointed by Donald Trump, said the question of whether the state had violated the law was “not a close one”.Notably, the majority rejected an argument from Alabama that it should only be required to draw an additional majority-Black district if the plaintiffs could prove it was required without considering race. That theory would have made it extremely difficult for plaintiffs to show discrimination had occurred in redistricting against minority voters.“This court has long recognized – and as all members of this court today agree – the text of §2 establishes an effects test, not an intent test,” Kavanaugh wrote in a concurring opinion. “The effects test, as applied by Gingles to redistricting, requires in certain circumstances that courts account for the race of voters so as to prevent the cracking or packing – whether intentional or not – of large and geographically compact minority populations.”Joe Biden praised the court’s decision and said he and Vice-President Kamala Harris would continue to push Congress to restore the full protections of the Voting Rights Act. The US supreme court, in a 5-4 opinion authored by Roberts in 2013, gutted a key provision of the law that required states with a history of voting discrimination to get voting changes pre-cleared by the federal government before they went into effect.“The right to vote and have that vote counted is sacred and fundamental – it is the right from which all of our other rights spring. Key to that right is ensuring that voters pick their elected officials – not the other way around,” the president said in a statement. “Today’s decision confirms the basic principle that voting practices should not discriminate on account of race, but our work is not done.”Merrick Garland, the US attorney general, praised the decision in a statement.“Today’s decision rejects efforts to further erode fundamental voting rights protections, and preserves the principle that in the United States, all eligible voters must be able to exercise their constitutional right to vote free from discrimination based on their race,” he said. “The right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy, the right from which all other rights ultimately flow.”Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a dissenting opinion that was joined at various parts by fellow conservative justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett. The supreme court has long misinterpreted section 2, he wrote, restating his prior view that it does not even apply to redistricting cases. He also wrote that the majority opinion required too much consideration of race in drawing district lines and urged a more race-neutral approach.“As applied here, the amended §2 thus falls on the wrong side of ‘the line between measures that remedy or prevent unconstitutional actions and measures that make a substantive change in the governing law’,” Thomas wrote. “It replaces the constitutional right against intentionally discriminatory districting with an amorphous race-based right to a ‘fair’ distribution of political power, a ‘right’ that cannot be implemented without requiring the very evils the constitution forbids.”Alito, writing separately in dissent, also said that the plaintiffs advocating for an additional majority-minority district “must show at the outset that such a district can be created without making race the predominant factor in its creation”.“Today’s decision unnecessarily sets the VRA on a perilous and unfortunate path,” he wrote.The supreme court intervened in February 2022 on an emergency request and allowed Alabama’s maps to go into effect for the 2022 elections. Even though Alabama’s election was not until the end of May, the court said it was too close to the election to upend the map.Alabama had argued that the lower court had wrongly decided the case by taking race too much into account. The challengers in the case should have been required to show that they could draw a second majority-Black district without considering race at all, Edmund LaCour, the state’s solicitor general, said during oral argument last year.The case was seen as a “textbook” example of the kind of discrimination in redistricting that section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was designed to prevent. The provision outlaws any voting practice that discriminates on the basis of race and litigants have frequently used it to challenge electoral maps that make it harder for minorities to elect the candidate of their choice. It was widely understood to be the most powerful remaining provision in the landmark civil rights law after the US supreme court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v Holder. That decision blocked another part of the landmark civil rights law requiring states with a history of voting discrimination to get their changes approved by the federal government. More

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      Schumer decries Republican senator’s ‘revolting’ remarks on white nationalists

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      The Democratic US Senate leader, Chuck Schumer, condemned as “utterly revolting” remarks in which the Alabama Republican Tommy Tuberville appeared to defend white nationalists in the US military.In an interview with the Alabama station WBHM, published on Monday, Tuberville was asked: “Do you believe they should allow white nationalists in the military?”He answered: “Well, they call them that. I call them Americans.”The Senate armed forces committee member added: “We are losing in the military so fast. And why? I can tell you why. Because the Democrats are attacking our military, saying we need to get out the white extremists, the white nationalists, people that don’t believe in our agenda, as Joe Biden’s agenda.”Tuberville is currently attempting to impose his own agenda on the US military, by blocking promotions and appointments in protest of Pentagon rules about abortion access.On Thursday, Schumer said: “Does Senator Tuberville honestly believe that our military is stronger with white nationalists in its ranks? I cannot believe this needs to be said, but white nationalism has no place in our armed forces and no place in any corner of American society, period, full stop, end of story.”Previously, Sherrilyn Ifill, a former president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) legal defense fund, said: “I hope we are not getting so numb that we refrain from demanding that Mr Tuberville’s colleagues in the Senate condemn his remarks.”Schumer added: “I urge Senator Tuberville to think about the destructive spectacle he is creating in the Senate. His actions are dangerous.”On Wednesday, a spokesperson for Tuberville said he was “being skeptical of the notion that there are white nationalists in the military, not that he believes they should be in the military”.A Tuberville spokesperson told the Washington Post the senator “resents the implication that the people in our military are anything but patriots and heroes”.The same spokesperson told NBC Tuberville “has kind of a sarcastic sense of humor” and “was expressing doubt about this being a problem in the military”.Reports have shown the US military has a problem with white nationalism and white supremacy, despite the Pentagon having prohibited “active participation” in extremist groups since 1996.In October 2020, a Pentagon report warning of a problem with white supremacists in the military was sent to Congress. It was released in 2021.In February 2022, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremism, co-published documents showing one in five applicants to one white supremacist group claimed ties to the US military.On Thursday, Adam Hodge, spokesperson for the White House national security council, said it was “abhorrent that Senator Tuberville would argue that white nationalists should be allowed to serve in the military, while he also threatens our national security by holding all pending DoD military and civilian nominations.“Extremist behavior has no place in our military. None.”Fact-checking Tuberville, WBHM, an NPR station, noted Pentagon efforts “to keep extremists, particularly fascists, out of the military”.The station also fact-checked a remark about “what [Joe Biden’s] done to our military with the woke ideas, with the [critical race theory] that we’re teaching in our military”.Critical race theory is an academic discipline that examines the ways in which racism operates in US laws and society. Republicans have turned it into an electoral wedge issue.WBHM said: “The US military is not requiring that CRT be taught and there is little evidence that it’s being discussed much at all in the ranks. According to Military Times, the one instance in which it is being used in an educational setting is at the US Military Academy at West Point.” More

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      Alabama Third Congressional District Primary Election Results 2022

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      Source: Election results and race calls are from The Associated Press.The New York Times’s results team is a group of graphics editors, engineers and reporters who build and maintain software to publish election results in real-time as they are reported by results providers. To learn more about how election results work, read this article.The Times’s election results pages are produced by Michael Andre, Aliza Aufrichtig, Neil Berg, Matthew Bloch, Sean Catangui, Andrew Chavez, Nate Cohn, Alastair Coote, Annie Daniel, Asmaa Elkeurti, Tiffany Fehr, Andrew Fischer, Will Houp, Josh Katz, Aaron Krolik, Jasmine C. Lee, Rebecca Lieberman, Ilana Marcus, Jaymin Patel, Rachel Shorey, Charlie Smart, Umi Syam, Urvashi Uberoy, Isaac White and Christine Zhang. Reporting by Alana Celii, Michael C. Bender, Lalena Fisher, J. David Goodman, Maya King and Neil Vigdor; production by Amanda Cordero and Jessica White; editing by Wilson Andrews, Kenan Davis, Amy Hughes and Ben Koski. More

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      G.O.P. States Abandon Group That Helps Fight Voter Fraud

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      Five red states have severed ties since last year with the Electronic Registration Information Center, a nonprofit that helps maintain accurate voter rolls.First to leave was Louisiana, followed by Alabama.Then, in one fell swoop, Florida, Missouri and West Virginia announced on Monday that they would drop out of a bipartisan network of about 30 states that helps maintain accurate voter rolls, one that has faced intensifying attacks from election deniers and right-wing media.Ohio may not be far behind, according to a letter sent to the group Monday from the state’s chief election official, Frank LaRose. Mr. LaRose and his counterparts in the five states that left the group are all Republicans.For more than a year, the Electronic Registration Information Center, a nonprofit organization known as ERIC, has been hit with false claims from allies of former President Donald J. Trump who say it is a voter registration vehicle for Democrats that received money from George Soros, the liberal billionaire and philanthropist, when it was created in 2012.Mr. Trump even chimed in on Monday, urging all Republican governors to sever ties with the group, baselessly claiming in a Truth Social media post that it “pumps the rolls” for Democrats.The Republicans who announced their states were leaving the group cited complaints about governance issues, chiefly that it mails newly eligible voters who have not registered ahead of federal elections. They also accused the group of opening itself up to a partisan influence.In an interview on Tuesday, Jay Ashcroft, a Republican who is Missouri’s secretary of state, said that the group had balked at his state’s calls for reforms, some of which were expected to be weighed by the group’s board of directors at a meeting on March 17. He denied that the decision to pull out was fueled by what the organization and its defenders have described as a right-wing smear campaign.“It’s not like I was antagonistic toward cleaning our voter rolls,” Mr. Ashcroft said.Shane Hamlin, the group’s executive director, did not comment about particular complaints of the states in an email on Tuesday, but referred to an open letter that he wrote on March 2 saying that the organization had been the subject of substantial misinformation regarding the nature of its work and who has access to voter lists.Wes Allen, Alabama’s secretary of state, withdrew the state from the Electronic Registration Information Center in January, a day after he was sworn in.Butch Dill/Associated PressDefenders of the group lamented the departures, saying they would weaken the group’s information-sharing efforts and undermine it financially because of lost dues. And, they said, the defections conflict with the election integrity mantra that has motivated Republicans since Mr. Trump’s defeat in 2020.Republicans haven’t always been so sour about the work of the coalition, which Louisiana left in 2022.It was just last year that Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida mentioned the group’s benefit to his state, which he described as useful for checking voter rolls during a news conference announcing the highly contentious arrests of about 20 people on voter fraud charges. He was joined then by Cord Byrd, Florida’s secretary of state, a fellow Republican who, on Monday, was expressing a much different opinion. In an announcement that Florida was leaving the group, Mr. Byrd said that the state’s concerns about data security and “partisan tendencies” had not been addressed.“Therefore, we have lost confidence in ERIC,” Mr. Byrd said.Representatives for Mr. DeSantis, who is considering a Republican run for president, did not respond to a request for comment.Mr. LaRose, in Ohio, also had a stark shift in tone: After recently describing the group to reporters as imperfect but still “one of the best fraud-fighting tools that we have,” by Monday he was also calling for reforms and put the group on notice.“Anything short of the reforms mentioned above will result in action up to and including our withdrawal from membership,” Mr. LaRose wrote. “I implore you to do the right thing.”The complaints about partisanship seem centered on David Becker, a former Justice Department lawyer who helped develop the group and is a nonvoting board member. Mr. Ashcroft said he didn’t think that Mr. Becker, a former director of the elections program at the Pew Charitable Trusts who has vocally debunked election fraud claims, including disputing Mr. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, should be on the board.Mr. Becker is the founder and director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, another nonpartisan group that has been attacked by election deniers.“There’s truth and there’s lies,” Mr. Becker said on a video call with reporters on Tuesday. “I will continue to stand for the truth.”Mr. Hamlin vowed that the organization would “continue our work on behalf of our remaining member states in improving the accuracy of America’s voter rolls and increasing access to voter registration for all eligible citizens.”While some Republican states are ending their relationship with the group, California, the nation’s most populous state, could potentially join its ranks under a bill proposed by a Democratic state lawmaker. But in Texas, a Republican lawmaker has introduced a bill with the opposite intention.Still, Sam Taylor, a spokesman for Texas’s Republican secretary of state, said in an email on Tuesday that “We are not currently aware of any system comparable to ERIC, but are open to learning about other potentially viable, cost-effective alternatives.”New York, another heavily populated state, is also not a member of the group.Seven states started the organization more than a decade ago. It charges new members a one-time fee of $25,000 and annual dues that are partly based on the citizen voting age population in each state. The Pew Charitable Trusts provided seed funding to the group, but that money was separate from donations that it had received from Mr. Soros, according to the website PolitiFact.Shenna Bellows, a Democrat who is Maine’s secretary of state, said in an interview on Tuesday that the group had been particularly helpful in identifying voters who have died or may no longer live in the state, which became a member in 2021.“We have a lot of Mainers who retire to Florida for example,” Ms. Bellows said.Ms. Bellows called the recent defections “tragic” and said that her office had received several inquiries from residents who had read criticism of the group online.“Unfortunately, this move by our colleagues in Florida and elsewhere to leave ERIC in part because of misinformation being spread by election deniers deprives all of us of the ability to effectively clean our voter rolls and fight voter fraud,” she said. More

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      Biden pays tribute to heroes of Selma’s ‘Bloody Sunday’ and highlights voting rights

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      Biden pays tribute to heroes of Selma’s ‘Bloody Sunday’ and highlights voting rightsThe president spoke of the civil rights movement march that led to passage of landmark voting rights legislation nearly 60 years agoJoe Biden paid tribute to the heroes of the “Bloody Sunday” civil rights march nearly 60 years ago and used its annual commemoration to warn of an ongoing threat to US democracy from election deniers and the erosion of voting rights.The US president joined thousands of people in Selma, Alabama to mark the movement that led to passage of landmark voting rights legislation shortly after peaceful marchers were brutally attacked by law enforcement on a bridge though town.Speaking on a Selma stage with the bridge as a backdrop, Biden warned that the right to vote in the US – which the civil rights marchers had sought to gain for Black Americans – was far from safe amid a concerted push to weaken voting rights legislation across the US and prominent Republican efforts to call into question election results.“The right to vote – to have your vote counted – is the threshold of democracy … This fundamental rights remains under assault,” Biden said.He added: We have to remain vigilant … In America hate and extremism will not prevail though they are raising their ugly heads again.”The speech presented Biden with a chance to speak directly to the current generation of civil rights activists. Many feel dejected because the president has been unable to make good on a campaign pledge to bolster voting rights and are eager to see his administration keep the issue in the spotlight.‘We’re hitting the soil’: Georgia activists mobilize voters in an off yearRead moreBiden underscored the importance of commemorating Bloody Sunday so that history can’t be erased, while making the case that the fight for voting rights remains integral to delivering economic justice and civil rights for Black Americans, according to White House officials.This year’s commemoration came as the historic city of roughly 18,000 is still digging out from the aftermath of a January EF-2 tornado that destroyed or damaged thousands of properties in and around Selma.Ahead of Biden’s visit, the Rev William Barber II, a co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, along with six other activists wrote to the president and members of Congress to express their frustration with the lack of progress on voting rights legislation.In his speech, Biden vowed to push ahead with those laws and also to keep up the pressure to get new laws passed on police reform, though that will not be easy now that Republicans control the House of Representatives after securing a narrow win in the 2022 midterm elections.Other parts of Biden’s address sounded like a stump speech as the US awaits a widely expected announcement from the president that he will run for a second term. He touted his economic achievements and strove to strike a tone of optimism for the US as it seeks to overcome hard times.Former president Donald Trump has already declared his own intention to run for the White House again. Trump’s own election pitch is full of false claims about the 2020 election though he remains a strong favorite to secure the Republican nomination.Few moments have had as lasting importance to the civil rights movement as what happened on 7 March 1965 in Selma and in the weeks that followed.Some 600 peaceful demonstrators led by Lewis and Williams had gathered that day, just weeks after the fatal shooting of a young Black man, Jimmie Lee Jackson, by an Alabama trooper.Lewis, who would later serve in the US House representing Georgia, and the others were brutally beaten by Alabama troopers and sheriff’s deputies as they tried to cross Selma’s Edmund Pettus bridge at the start of what was supposed to be a 54-mile walk to the state capital in Montgomery, part of a larger effort to register Black voters in the south.The images of the police violence sparked outrage across the country. Days later, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr led what became known as the “Turnaround Tuesday” march, in which marchers approached a wall of police at the bridge and prayed before turning back.President Lyndon B Johnson introduced the Voting Rights Act of 1965 eight days after Bloody Sunday, calling Selma one of those rare moments in American history when “history and fate meet at a single time”.The Associated Press contributed to this reportTopicsCivil rights movementUS voting rightsJoe BidenUS politicsAlabamaMartin Luther KingnewsReuse this content More

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      ‘It’s good to think strategically’: Thomas E Ricks on civil rights and January 6

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      Interview‘It’s good to think strategically’: Thomas E Ricks on civil rights and January 6Martin Pengelly in Washington In his new book, the historian considers the work of Martin Luther King and others through the lens of military thoughtThere is a direct connection from Freedom Summer to the January 6 committee,” says Thomas E Ricks as he discusses his new book, Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968.‘Now is a continuation of then’: America’s civil rights era – in picturesRead moreFreedom Summer was a 1964 campaign to draw attention to violence faced by Black people in Mississippi when they tried to vote. The House January 6 committee will soon conclude its hearings on the Capitol riot of 2021, when supporters of Donald Trump attacked American democracy itself.But the committee is chaired by Bennie Thompson. In his opening statement, in June, the Democrat said: “I was born, raised, and still live in Bolton, Mississippi … I’m from a part of the country where people justify the actions of slavery, Ku Klux Klan and lynching. I’m reminded of that dark history as I hear voices today try and justify the actions of the insurrectionists of 6 January 2021.”Ricks is reminded of the insurrectionists as he retells that grim history. Watching the January 6 hearings, he says, he “was looking at Bennie Thompson. And I realised, his career follows right on.“Summer ’64, you start getting Black people registered in Mississippi. A tiny minority, about 7%, are able to vote in ’64 but it rises to I think 59% by ’68. Bennie Thompson gets elected alderman [of Bolton, in 1969], mayor [1973] and eventually to Congress [1993]. And then as a senior member of Congress, chairs this January 6 committee.“Well, there is a direct connection from Freedom Summer, and [civil rights leaders] Amzie Moore, Bob Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer and Dave Dennis, to the January 6 committee. And I think that’s a wonderful thing.”Under Thompson, Ricks says, the January 6 committee is acting strategically, “establishing an indisputable factual record of what happened”, a bulwark against attempts to rewrite history.“It’s always good to think strategically,” Ricks says. Which brings him back to his book.As a reporter for the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, Ricks was twice part of teams that won a Pulitzer prize. His bestselling books include Fiasco (2006) and The Gamble (2009), lacerating accounts of the Iraq disaster, and The Generals (2012), on the decline of US military leadership. In Waging a Good War, he applies the precepts of military strategy to the civil rights campaigns.He says: “This book, I wrote because I had to. I had to get it out of my head. The inspiration was I married a woman who had been active in civil rights.”Mary Kay Ricks is the author of Escape on the Pearl (2008), about slavery and the Underground Railroad. In the 1960s, she was “president of High School Friends of the SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee], Washington DC chapter.“She would pick people up at Union Station and drive them wherever they needed to be. So her memory of [the late Georgia congressman] John Lewis is him arriving, saying, ‘I’m hungry, take me to McDonald’s.’ All our lives we would be driving along, and somebody would be on the radio, and she’d say, ‘Oh, I knew that guy’ or ‘I dated that guy. Oh, I thought he was crazy.’“So I was reading about the civil rights movement to understand my wife and the stories she told me. And the more I read, the more it struck me: ‘Wow. This is an area that can really be illuminated by military thinking.’ That a lot of what they were doing was what in military operations is called logistics, or a classic defensive operation, or a holding action, or a raid behind enemy lines. And the more I looked at it, the more I thought each of the major civil rights campaigns could be depicted in that light.”In 1961, campaigners launched the Freedom Rides, activists riding buses across the south, seeking to draw attention and thereby end illegal segregation onboard and in stations. It was dangerous work, daring and remote. Ricks compares the Freedom Rides to cavalry raids, most strikingly to civil war operations by the Confederate “Gray Ghost”, John Singleton Mosby.“The Freedom Rides as raids behind enemy lines. What does that mean? Well, it struck me again and again how military-like the civil rights movement was in careful preparation. What is the task at hand? How do we prepare? What sort of people do we need to carry out this mission? What kind of training do they need?“Before the Freedom Rides they sent a young man, Tom Gaither, on a reconnaissance trip, where he drew maps of each bus station so they would know where the segregated waiting rooms were. He reported back: ‘The two cities where you’re going to have trouble are Anniston, Alabama, and Montgomery, Alabama.’ There are real race tensions in those cities.”Activists faced horrendous violence. They met it with non-violence.“They did months of training. First of all, how to capture and prevent the impulse to fight or flee. Somebody slugs you, spits on you, puts out a cigarette on your back. They knew how to react: non-violent.“But this is a really militant form of non-violence. Gandhi denounced the term passive resistance. And these people, many of them followers of God, devoted readers of Gandhi, understood this was very confrontational.”In 1965, Selma, Alabama, was the scene of Bloody Sunday, when white authorities attacked a march on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and southern racism stood exposed.Ricks says: “A line I love comes from Selma. People said, ‘What are we doing when the sheriff comes after us?’ The organisers said, ‘No, you’re going after the sheriff.’ A good example: CT Vivian, one of my heroes, a stalwart of civil rights, is thrown down the steps of the county courthouse at Selma by Jim Clark, the county sheriff. And Vivian looks up and yells, ‘Who are you people? What do you tell your wives and children?’“It is such a human question. And in this confrontational form of non-violence, I think they flummoxed the existing system, of white supremacism, which the world saw was a system built on violence inherited from slavery.”Bloody Sunday remembered: civil rights marchers tell story of their iconic photosRead moreRicks has written about his time in Iraq and post-traumatic stress disorder. At the end of Waging a Good War, he considers how those who campaigned for civil rights, who were beaten, shot and imprisoned, struggled to cope with the toll.“If you want to understand the full cost, it’s important to write about the effect on the activists and their families, their children. Dave Dennis Jr, the son of one of the people who ran Freedom Summer, he and I have talked about this a bit. We believe the Veterans Administration should be open to veterans of the civil rights movement. There aren’t a lot of veterans still alive. Nonetheless, it would be a meaningful gesture that could help some people who have had a hard time in life.”In a passage that could fuel a whole book, Ricks considers how Martin Luther King Jr, the greatest civil rights leader, struggled in the years before his assassination, in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968.Like many PTSD sufferers, King sought refuge in drink and sex. But for Ricks, “the moment that captures it for me is he’s sitting in a rocking chair in Atlanta, with his friend Dorothy Cotton. And he says, ‘I think I should take a sabbatical.’ This is about 1967. This guy had been under daily threat for 13 years. I compare him to [Dwight] Eisenhower and the pressures he was under as a top commander in world war two … yet King does this for well over a decade. The stress was enormous. I only wish he had been able to take that sabbatical.”The campaign took its toll on others, among them James Bevel, a “tactically innovative, strategically brilliant” activist who abused women and children, moved far right and died in disgrace.Ricks hopes his book might help make other activists better known, among them Pauli Murray, Diane Nash – a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom – and Fred Shuttlesworth, “a powerful character, a moonshiner turned minister”.Shuttlesworth lived in Birmingham, Alabama, scene of some of the worst attacks on the civil rights movement, most of all the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963, in which four young girls were killed.To Ricks, “If there’s a real moment of despair in Martin Luther King’s life, it’s the Birmingham church bombing. He says, ‘At times, life is hard, as hard as crucible steel.’ That was the focal point for how I think about what King went through.”But there is light in Birmingham too. Ricks recounts the time “the white establishment calls Fred Shuttlesworth up and says, ‘We hear Martin Luther King might be coming to town. What can we do to stop that?’ And he leans back and smiles and says, ‘You know, I’ve been bombed twice in this town. Nobody called me then. But now you want to talk?’“Shuttlesworth threw himself into things. He believed in non-violence as an occasional tactic, not as a way of life. He sent a carloads of guys carrying shotguns to rescue the Freedom Riders from the KKK in Anniston.“Then there’s Amzie Moore. I wish I could have written more about him. He came home from world war two, worked at a federal post office so he would not be under control of local government. He starts his own gas station and refuses to have whites-only bathrooms. ‘Nope, not gonna do it.’ To me, he’s like a member of the French Resistance but he does it for 20 years. When Bob Moses and other civil rights workers go to Mississippi, he’s the guy they look up. ‘How do I survive in Mississippi?’ And he tells them and helps them.”Waging a Good War also considers how campaigners today might learn from those who went before. Ricks says: “Some of the people in the Black Lives Matter era have reached back. I talked to one person who went to James Lawson, the trainer of the Nashville sit-ins in 1960, and asked, ‘How do you go about this? How do you think about this? What about losses? Instructions?’“A demonstration is only the end product, the tip of an iceberg. There has to be careful preparation, consideration of, ‘What message are we trying to send? How are we going to send it? How are we going to follow up?’ So James Lawson conveys that message. Similarly, Bob Moses, who recently died, attended a Black Lives Matter meeting. There are roots by which today’s movements reach back down to the movements of the forefathers.”Democrats see hope in Stacey Abrams (again) in a crucial US election – if she can get voters to show upRead moreHe also sees echoes in two major strands of activism today.“Stacey Abrams’ work on voting rights is very similar to a lot of the work Martin Luther King did with the SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference]. Fighting voter suppression, finding ways to encourage minorities to register and to vote, looking to expand the franchise.“Black Lives Matter reminds me of SNCC, if somewhat more radical, more focused not on gaining power through the vote but on abuses of power, especially police brutality.“It’s sad that the problems the movement tried to address in the 1950s and 60s still need to be addressed. We have moments of despair. Nonetheless, one of things about writing the book was to show people who went through difficult times, and usually found ways to succeed.“The more I learned, the more I enjoyed it. It was a real contrast. Writing about the Iraq war? It’s hard. This felt good. I was hauled to my writing desk every morning. I loved writing this book.”
      Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 is published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
      TopicsBooksCivil rights movementUS politicsRaceThe far rightProtestBlack Lives Matter movementinterviewsReuse this content More