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      Voting rights veterans share lessons with new generation of activists: ‘Build on the foundation’

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      US voting rightsVoting rights veterans share lessons with new generation of activists: ‘Build on the foundation’ Freedom Summer registered hundreds of Black people to vote in Mississippi in 1964 in defiance of Jim Crow lawsCarlisa N JohnsonMon 18 Oct 2021 06.00 EDTLast modified on Mon 18 Oct 2021 11.35 EDTIn the early 1960s, Charles McLaurin served as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), laying the groundwork for a massive voter registration drive in Mississippi known as Freedom Summer. That historic summer of 1964, young people from across the country poured into the state to help register Black people to vote, a campaign that energized the US civil rights movement and exposed Mississippi’s racial terrors.“In 1962, there was not a single Black elected official in the whole state and Mississippi only had about 5% of the Black population registered to vote,” said McLaurin, flanked by his former SNCC colleagues Freddie Biddle and Hollis Watkins at a recent conference commemorating the organization’s founding in 1960.Today, Mississippi has Black elected officials, but it also has some of the most restrictive voter laws in the nation in a state that has the largest proportion of Black voters at 38%. While SNCC is no longer active, the conference’s goal was to share organizing lessons from the past to further the fight to vote today as states across the country enact voter suppression laws that are undoing the gains, earned in blood, of the civil rights movement.Then, as now, youth are key, Watkins said.“One of the things, based on what I saw in the early phases of the civil rights movement is, if we, the older ones, will step over to the side and become ones that help, the young people will get it done. And the reason I know is because I used to be a young person,” Watkins said during a panel on the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP).The Freedom party sought to unseat the state’s ruling, all-white Democratic party at a time when Black Mississippians faced a litany of tactics to prevent them from voting, from outright intimidation to impossible literacy tests.“The white supremacists would like to make it seem like it’s different [today], what they put us up against, all those years until the Voting Rights Act [of 1965],” said Judy Richardson, a former secretary at the national SNCC headquarters who helped organize the conference. “Saying that you can’t give water to someone in a line after you have closed umpteen voting locations. It’s no different from somebody at a poll saying, ‘How many bubbles in a bar of soap?’ The tactics are very similar in terms of what the aim is: to nullify our vote and ultimately stop from sharing power, because it is all about power.”Today, Black Voters Matter, Fair Fight, Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, the New Georgia Project and other voting rights groups are tapping the organizing framework used by SNCC and other civil rights organizations to develop a grassroots campaign to register and educate voters. Invigorating Black political power through in-depth civic and voter education was the root of SNCC’s approach. During Freedom Summer, SNCC established schools to teach civics, but also reading, math and other subjects. The organization’s work was grounded in speaking to the issues of individual communities.Nsé Ufot, CEO of the New Georgia Project, who participated in the SNCC conference, says in Georgia, like Mississippi in the 1960s, her group is training organizers to go into communities and educate voters in preparation for the election season. Nearly 1,000 Georgians are under investigation for violating five new voting-related laws in the state.Part of what made SNCC so effective was coalition building with local leaders, Ufot said in an interview after the conference. “I subscribe to the gospel choir theory of organizing. The reason they can hold a note for so long, so powerfully, is that each individual vocalist is doing what they can when they can. They are doing their part,” she said.In the 1960s, however, building interest within Black communities was not always easy, SNCC veterans said.“We got the NAACP, CORE, SNCC, SCLC and all of these organizations and put them under an umbrella called COFO,” McLaurin explained, naming the leading civil rights groups of the time. COFO, or the Council of Federated Organizations, was an easier way to organize Mississippi’s Black citizens around voting rights. “Over the years, white people and the power structure had stigmatized our organizations to the point a lot of Blacks were afraid to identify with it.”Through COFO, organizations were able to pool resources for several civil rights causes, including voting. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was founded through this coalition, which eventually brought the necessary national attention to the state to move the needle closer to equal voting rights for Black residents.Richardson, who supported the organization’s voting rights efforts in Lowndes county, Mississippi, said coalition building was critical. “It was about having a coalition. Having allies in place, the good-intentioned white people, the community leaders, and the everyday Black people down in Mississippi. That is how we kept pushing forward and achieving our goals,” Richardson told the Guardian.What most inspired Richardson was the everyday people who took a stand, despite losing their livelihoods and having their lives threatened.“For me, it wasn’t the March on Washington. It was going to Hattiesburg [Mississippi] and these small communities and seeing you’ve got 80,000 Black folks who say we really do want to vote,” said Richardson. “Eighty thousand Black folks who have seen their sisters and nephews, neighbors and all these folks beaten, killed and all kinds of violence throughout their community. And yet still 80,000 of them saying, ‘We don’t care; we are going to try and register to vote.’”While the names of some organizers have become more well known, they did not set out to garner recognition. Fannie Lou Hamer, who famously said at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, ‘I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired’, got her start as an organizer when she applied to vote. At the time, she was living on a plantation in Mississippi.“The plantation owner told Fannie Lou Hamer that if she wouldn’t go back to the courthouse and withdraw her application to vote that she would have to leave,” said McLaurin. “So, Fannie Lou Hamer left the plantation and came into Ruleville, and she became one of the most important leaders in the effort to register to vote.”Ufot says she is part of that legacy.“I am in a long unbroken chain of freedom fighters. I am excited to make sure the America, and the world our ancestors fought for is something we haven’t given up on,” she said. “I think that there are so many opportunities for us to lead in this moment, for us to build upon the foundation our SNCC veterans have laid for us.”TopicsUS voting rightsUS politicsMississippifeaturesReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      Children are ‘vulnerable host’ for Covid as cases recede, US expert warns

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      A US public health expert has warned that though cases of Covid-19 are at their lowest rates for months and much of the country is returning to normal life, young Americans are still “a vulnerable host” for the coronavirus.Dr Richina Bicette, associate medical director at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, told CNN children were now accounting for nearly 25% of US cases.“As adults get vaccinated and become more protected and immune,” she said, “the virus is still in the community looking for a vulnerable host and pediatric patients fit that description.”Children aged 12 and above are eligible to receive the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, one of three in US use. Federal authorities will this week debate extending vaccines to children aged 11 and under.Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data shows that 52% of the US population over the age of 12 has had at least one vaccine dose and 42% is fully protected.The Biden administration wants 70% of US adults to have received at least one shot by 4 July. A range of incentives are being offered.Deaths in the US have slowed drastically, the toll a little under 590,000. But with virus variants causing problems as other countries reopen, experts have voiced concern over slowing rates of vaccination, particularly in Republican states.On Sunday the Republican governor of Mississippi, Tate Reeves, appeared on CNN’s State of the Union.Mississippi is 50th and last among states in vaccinations, with 30% of residents fully protected and 40.5% aged 12 and older having received at least one dose, according to the CDC. The states with the highest vaccination rates are Vermont (80.6% – with a Republican governor, Phil Scott), Hawaii (78.6%) and Massachusetts (76.8%).“I believe the vaccine works,” Reeves said. “I believe it’s safe. I believe it’s effective. I took my first dose in January, as did my wife, on TV live, and I have encouraged Mississippians to do the same.“But I also want to point out that President Biden’s goals for 4 July or otherwise are arbitrary to say the least.”Reeves said his focus was on providing “quality care” for people with Covid-19 – and trumpeted a steep decline in hospitalisations.“At our peak, we had 1,444 individuals in the hospital,” he said. “Today, we have 131. We’re down 90%. At our peak, we had 2,400 cases per day over a seven-day period. Over the last seven days, we have had barely 800 cases in total.“And so, for that entire year period, the goalpost was, let’s reduce the number of cases. And we have been successful at doing that. The question is, why?“We have had a million Mississippians that have gotten the vaccine, but we have also had 320,000 Mississippians that have tested positive for the virus. Many people believe that somewhere between four and five times more people have gotten the virus that have not tested [positive].“And so we have got probably a million or so Mississippians that have natural immunity. And because of that, there is very, very, very little virus in our state. But we’re still working to get the vaccine distributed, and hope we will continue to do so.”Asked if he was worried unvaccinated Mississippians could be “sitting ducks” to any surge involving a virus variant, Reeves avoided the question, complaining instead about political clashes with Biden officials.Host Jake Tapper changed tack, saying: “You seem to be arguing everybody should get vaccinated, and yet it’s not that big a deal that not everybody’s getting vaccinated. And those seem to be in conflict.”He then asked if Reeves would agree that Mississippians should go get vaccinated.“I would absolutely agree,” Reeves said. “I think that all Mississippians and all Americans should go get vaccinated, because I think it’s safe, I think it’s effective and I think it’s one way to continue to drive down the numbers.” More

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      Should Biden reform the supreme court? Politics Weekly Extra – podcast

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      Last week, the US supreme court agreed to hear a case that could significantly roll back abortion rights. This week, Jonathan Freedland speaks to Christopher Kang, former deputy counsel to President Obama, about calls to restructure the highest federal court in the country

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      Christopher Kang spent several years working in the White House when Barack Obama was in office. Now he is the co-founder and chief counsel of Demand Justice, an organisation pushing for Congress to pass a bill that would allow the addition of four seats to the US supreme court, diluting the majority conservatives currently have on the bench. Jonathan questions the consequences of such an act, whether there is another way to restore balance, and the politics behind such a radical move. More

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      Fauci warns against lifting Covid measures but Republican states push on

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      The top infectious disease expert in the US, Dr Anthony Fauci, has warned it is too early to end Covid-19 restrictions, despite Texas and Mississippi having lifted mask mandates and business capacity limits this week.States are easing restrictions after a drop in cases, though that decline is starting to plateau at a high rate of 60,000 to 70,000 infections per day.“We’re going in the right direction but we just need to hang on a bit longer,” Fauci said on Sunday, to CBS’s Face the Nation.Public health experts have warned that the US could undermine progress with vaccines and allow for thousands of preventable deaths by lifting restrictions at the first sign of improvements. More than 524,000 people have died from Covid-19 in the US and January was its deadliest month of the pandemic so far.Fauci, chief medical adviser to Joe Biden, said turning restrictions “on and off” risked another surge.“This is not going to be indefinite, we need to gradually pull back as we get people vaccinated,” he said.Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist who advised Biden’s transition team, warned the US was still “in the eye of the hurricane”.Osterholm told NBC’s Meet the Press the situation appeared to be improving, but said he was concerned the B117 variant, which is 50% more infectious than other variants in the US, could create a new surge.“We do have to keep America as safe as we can from this virus by not letting up on any of the public health measures we’ve taken and we need to get people vaccinated as quickly as we can,” said Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.On CNN’s State of the Union, the Mississippi governor, Tate Reeves, said he lifted restrictions in his state because of declining rates of hospitalizations.“Our objective in Mississippi has never been to rid ourselves of the virus … our goal is to make sure we protect the integrity of our healthcare system,” the Republican said.Mississippi has seen an average of 461 cases per day, down 17% from the average two weeks ago, according to the New York Times. There were 1,240 deaths from Covid-19 in the state in January, the highest of any month since the pandemic began. About 16% of residents have received a first vaccine dose.“The numbers in Mississippi don’t justify government intervention,” said Reeves, who encouraged residents to keep wearing masks in crowded settings.Other governors have celebrated their state’s mask mandates and said they will remain in place until there is a substantial improvement in infection rates.Mike DeWine of Ohio, a Republican, told ABC’s This Week his state’s mask order was followed by a “significant drop in cases”.“We’ve seen it throughout this last year, these mask really, really work,” DeWine said.He said his state would drop health orders once it had 50 cases or fewer per 100,000 people for two weeks. Though rates were still high in Ohio, he said, the state’s vaccination distribution was getting better each day.“But as we’re doing that, we can’t give up the defense,” DeWine said.The dean of Brown University’s school of public health, Ashish Jha, said decisions such as those by Reeves and Texas governor Greg Abbott to lift restrictions could slow the process of getting life back to normal and put residents at risk of infection and death.“Given how close we are to the finish line, anybody who gets infected today and dies in three or four weeks is somebody who would have gotten vaccinated a month from now,” Jha told ABC. “This is why it’s urgent to just keep going for a little bit longer.” More

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      Voter Suppression Is Grand Larceny

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyVoter Suppression Is Grand LarcenyWe are watching another theft of power.Opinion ColumnistFeb. 28, 2021, 7:20 p.m. ETCredit…Charles Krupa/Associated PressIn 1890, Mississippi became one of the first states in the country to call a constitutional convention for the express purpose of writing white supremacy into the DNA of the state.At the time, a majority of the registered voters in the state were Black men.The lone Black delegate to the convention, Isaiah Montgomery, participated in openly suppressing the voting eligibility of most of those Black men, in the hope that this would reduce the terror, intimidation and hostility that white supremacists aimed at Black people.The committee on which he sat went even further. As he said at the convention:“As a further precaution to secure unquestioned white supremacy the committee have fixed an arbitrary appointment of the state, which fixes the legislative branch of the government at 130 members and the senatorial branch at 45 members.” The majority of the seats in both branches were “from white constituencies.”Speaking to the Black people he was disenfranchising, Montgomery said:“I wish to tell them that the sacrifice has been made to restore confidence, the great missing link between the two races, to restore honesty and purity to the ballot-box and to confer the great boon of political liberty upon the Commonwealth of Mississippi.”That sacrifice backfired horribly, as states across the South followed the Mississippi example, suppressing the Black vote, and Jim Crow reigned.That same sort of language is being used today to prevent people from voting, because when it comes to voter suppression, ignoble intentions are always draped in noble language. Those who seek to impede others from voting, in some cases to strip them of the right, often say that they are doing so to ensure the sanctity, integrity or purity of the vote.However, when the truth is laid bare, the defilement against which they rail is the voting power of the racial minority, the young — in their eyes, naïve and liberally indoctrinated — and the dyed-in-the-wool Democrats.In early February, a Brennan Center for Justice report detailed:“Thus far this year, thirty-three states have introduced, prefiled, or carried over 165 bills to restrict voting access. These proposals primarily seek to: (1) limit mail voting access; (2) impose stricter voter ID requirements; (3) slash voter registration opportunities; and (4) enable more aggressive voter roll purges. These bills are an unmistakable response to the unfounded and dangerous lies about fraud that followed the 2020 election.”On Feb. 24, the center updated its account to reveal that “as of February 19, 2021, state lawmakers have carried over, prefiled, or introduced 253 bills with provisions that restrict voting access in 43 states.”But it is the coded language that harkens to the post-Reconstruction era racism that strikes me.In Georgia, which went for a Democrat for the first time since Bill Clinton in 1992 and just elected two Democratic senators — one Black and one Jewish — there have been a raft of proposed voter restrictions. As State Representative Barry Fleming, a Republican and chair of the newly formed Special Committee on Election Integrity, put it recently, according to The Washington Post, “Our due diligence in this legislature [is] to constantly update our laws to try to protect the sanctity of the vote.”Kelly Loeffler, who lost her Senate bid in the state, has launched a voter organization because, as she said, “for too many in our state, the importance — and even the sanctity of their vote — is in question.” She continued, “That’s why we’re rolling up our sleeves to register conservative-leaning voters who have been overlooked, to regularly engage more communities, and to strengthen election integrity across our state.”Senator Rick Scott and other Republicans on Feb. 25 introduced the Save Democracy Act in what they said was an effort to “restore confidence in our elections.”Jessica Anderson of the conservative lobbying organization Heritage Action for America said of the legislation: “I applaud Senator Scott for putting forward common-sense, targeted reforms to help protect the integrity of our federal elections and the sanctity of the vote. The Save Democracy Act will protect against fraud and restore American’s confidence in our election systems while respecting the state’s sovereignty.”Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is pushing a slate of restrictive voter laws that would make it harder for Democrats to win in the state. On his website, the announcement read this way: “Today, Governor Ron DeSantis proposed new measures to safeguard the sanctity of Florida elections. The Governor’s announcement reaffirms his commitment to the integrity of every vote and the importance of transparency in Florida elections.”They can use all manner of euphemism to make it sound honorable, but it is not. This is an electoral fleecing in plain sight, one targeting people of color. We are watching another of history’s racist robberies. It’s grand larceny and, as usual, what is being stolen is power.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 and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More