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      The untold story of how a US woman was sentenced to six years for voting

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      The untold story of how a US woman was sentenced to six years for voting The case of Pamela Moses sparked a national outcry – but newly uncovered documents reveal the extent of its injusticeIt was the morning after Labor Day and Pamela Moses was in a rush.All summer, the outspoken activist had been feuding with election officials in Memphis, Tennessee. She wanted to get her name on the ballot for Memphis’s 2019 mayoral election, even gathering enough signatures to do so. But officials said she could not run – a prior felony conviction made her ineligible to seek office.Now, there was a new problem. In late August, the local elections commission sent her a letter saying they were going to cancel her voter registration. Moses was confused – she had been voting for years. That day, she was determined to sort it out.But what unfolded over just a few hours that day on 3 September 2019 would upend her life. It would lead to a sudden arrest months later at O’Hare airport in Chicago and culminate in a six-year prison sentence for voter fraud.Her case would go on to touch a nerve in the US and cause a national outcry. While there’s no comprehensive data on voter fraud prosecutions based on race, it was one of several recent examples in which Black defendants like Moses have faced long criminal sentences for voting errors, while white people have faced little punishment for more fraud. Long after the abolition of poll taxes and literacy tests, Black Americans still face significant scrutiny for trying to exercise their right to vote.What I learned from my interview with Pamela Moses, imprisoned for a voting errorRead moreTo make matters worse there is a byzantine bureaucracy in Tennessee and other US states, which can make it nearly impossible for people with felony convictions to vote again. The system has allowed officials to block people from voting for owing small sums of money and prosecutors to bring charges against others who make good-faith mistakes about their voting eligibility.But at the center of the Moses case was a relatively simple question: should someone who makes a voting mistake face serious criminal charges?Nearly everyone in Memphis seems to know Moses, 45, or has heard of her.She’s a self-taught student of the law – the librarians in the county law library know her by name – and has sued many of the top officials in Memphis, frequently representing herself in court. She’s appeared in local papers over the years. She’s had disagreements with other local activists and founded her own non-profit.“If she sees something that she feels is unjust, she’s going to say something about it,” said Dawn Harrington, who has been friends with Moses for over two decades and is the executive director of Free Hearts, a criminal justice non-profit. “She’s not going to be afraid of the backlash that might happen.”“She’ll always take you to the limit,” said Michael Working, a criminal defense attorney in Memphis who has represented Moses and known her for a decade. “She’s willing very often to be publicly flogged by the government on principle.”In person, Moses is at times mercurial, but often charming. She can rattle off the history of Memphis neighborhoods, the names of local judges, lawyers and statutes that she’s researched, sprinkling in bits of hip-hop history (she also writes and produces her own music). She is fiercely protective of Taj, her teenage son.Few officials attracted Moses’s ire as much as Amy Weirich, a Republican who served as the district attorney in Shelby county, which includes Memphis. Several years ago, Moses made local headlines when Weirich prosecuted her for stalking and harassing a local judge, tampering with evidence and forgery.In 2015, Moses pled guilty to those charges and was sentenced to several years of probation. Years later, she would say that pleading guilty and not fighting the case “was the worst mistake of my life”. She believed she was innocent, but the conviction led people to think she was guilty.Harrington, her longtime friend, said that the case cemented her status as someone who was disliked by people in high office in Memphis. “She had been on the bad side of the powers that be there,” she said.When Moses pled guilty, there was a hearing in which a judge questioned her and made sure she understood the consequences of her decision. But there was one ramification that neither the judge nor any of the lawyers present brought up: Moses would lose the right to vote for life.To understand Moses’s case, one needs to know that America has long stripped people convicted of felonies of the vote.After constitutional amendments in the 19th century expanded the franchise to Black Americans, many states passed felon disenfranchisement laws as a way to continue to keep African Americans from the ballot box and therefore prevent them from wielding political power, said Christopher Uggen, a professor at the University of Minnesota who has studied the topic closely. He suggested the laws have persisted because people with criminal convictions are stigmatized, and so seeking redress for them is politically fraught.Today, the laws continue to heavily affect Black Americans – 5.3% of the adult Black population is disenfranchised because of a felony, compared to 1.5% of the non-Black adult population. Overall, an estimated 4.6 million people can’t vote because of a felony conviction in the US.Bar chart comparing felony voting disenfranchisement of Black Americans to all AmericansMoses’s home state of Tennessee strips any person convicted of a felony of the right to vote. Nearly 472,000 people of voting age can’t vote in Tennessee because of a felony conviction, the vast majority of whom have completed their sentence, according to the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice non-profit. It’s estimated that more than one in five Black people of voting age in the state can’t vote because of a felony.In Tennessee, it is also extremely difficult for these people to get their voting rights back once they complete their sentences. There are three different sets of rules, depending on when the person was convicted. A request to even just fill out the state’s required application for the restoration of voting rights can be rejected for any reason – without explanation.Tennessee’s confusing system isn’t unusual. Many US states, particularly in the south, require anyone with a felony conviction to go through a bureaucratic process if they want to vote again.In Mississippi, people with certain felony convictions have to petition the legislature to restore their voting rights individually – and hardly anyone makes it through.In Florida, voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment in 2018 to repeal the state’s lifetime voting ban for most people with felonies. But the Florida legislature quickly stepped in and passed a measure that said completing a sentence meant paying all outstanding fines and court fees, which put voting again out of reach for many. Even if people can afford to pay, it’s extremely difficult to figure out how much they owe since the state has no centralized way of keeping track.Bar chart of the five states with the highest estimated rates of Black felony voter disenfranchisementThat uncertainty is the point of these laws, said Nicole Porter, the senior director of advocacy at the Sentencing Project.“I think there is intentionality behind the complications,” she said. “It’s about chilling or minimizing participation in the electorate by certain constituencies. It’s the modern day manifestation of very hard policies that dominated the Jim Crow era.”This was the tangled web Moses stepped into just after Labor Day in 2019.Because she didn’t realize she had lost her voting rights, she had been voting regularly until the summer of 2019. When she was informed that her voter registration was about to be canceled, Moses called the elections commission and asked what to do. She said a staffer advised her to go through the restoration process. (The elections commission declined to say to the Guardian whether it had ever advised her to do so.)The next step Moses took was the one on which her conviction – and its reversal – rested.One of the people required to fill out the form for her voting rights restoration was a probation officer, who had to confirm that Moses’s criminal sentence had concluded. When Moses showed up at the probation office on 3 September, she met with the manager on duty, named Kristoffer Billington, who had worked for the probation office for five years. He had never filled out the form before, he would later testify in court.Moses told him her probation was finished, and he went to the back of the office to research her case. Billington called a colleague in a different office for help. They both looked at Moses’s file in the computer system.According to the information they saw, it looked like Moses had finished her probation in 2018. But there was a problem – Moses’s computer file still showed she was on unsupervised probation. Billington thought this was a bureaucratic error and believed someone had forgotten to close out her file.As he was examining the case, the receptionist repeatedly called Billington’s office to tell him Moses was growing impatient and wanted to turn in the form to the election office, he would later testify. After about an hour of research, he wrote on the form that Moses had completed her probation, signed it and returned it to her.Billington had made a mistake. Unbeknownst to him, there were more case files that showed Moses’s felony probation wouldn’t expire until the following year, 2020. In parallel, Moses had been fighting in court that summer to have a judge declare that her sentence was over because she wanted to run for mayor. In court filings, she argued that her probation had expired. But courts disagreed. Moses didn’t think those rulings were correct and thought Billington and the probation office would be able to give her a more definitive answer.It might seem hard to believe that there was a dispute about something as basic as when Moses’s sentence ended. But those kinds of ambiguities are actually quite common, Uggen said.“People who aren’t subject to supervision don’t really understand how fuzzy things like release and supervision dates are,” he said. “Anybody inside the system or across jurisdictions knows that what’s written on this piece of paper might be very different than that other piece of paper.”And these bureaucratic mistakes can land people in prison.Just 30 minutes after Moses left his office, Billington got a call from someone in the Tennessee attorney general’s office telling him he made a mistake on the form. And after Moses turned in the form, the elections office quickly caught the mistake too. A few days earlier, they had referred her to prosecutors for potential voter fraud, owing to the fact they had learned she had been regularly voting while on probation.“Isn’t whether or not she completed the required probationary period for the 2015 felonies the subject of the [ongoing court case],” Pablo Varela, an attorney for the elections commission, emailed Kirby May, a prosecutor in the district attorney’s office shortly after Moses turned in the form. “How can the Court Clerk issue this attached document stating she has been granted final release from incarceration or supervision?”‘It’s a scare tactic’: Pamela Moses, the Black woman jailed over voting error, speaks outRead moreMay responded later that afternoon and attached a copy of a July court order saying Moses was still on probation. She was still ineligible to vote, he said.Vicki Collins, a staffer at the elections commission, forwarded Moses’s application to the Tennessee secretary of state’s office to review. “The Shelby County Election Commission has been in an ongoing lawsuit with Ms. Moses. She has been denied the right to be on the ballot for Mayor because she is still on probation until 2020,” wrote Collins, who specialized in helping people with felony convictions get their voting rights back. A little over an hour later, a lawyer with the secretary of state’s office wrote back. She agreed Moses was ineligible to vote, but offered a new reason for why.In 2015, one of the crimes Moses pled guilty to was tampering with evidence, which causes a permanent loss of voting rights in Tennessee. All of the research Billington had done at the probation office was irrelevant. It didn’t matter whether she was on probation or not.The next morning, Collins, the elections staffer, appeared happy to learn Moses was permanently barred from voting. “LOOK AT HER STATUS!!! PERMANENTLY INELIGIBLE,” she wrote in an email, including a smiley face.The same day, the elections office also received a letter from the Tennessee department of corrections alerting them to Billington’s error. The letter didn’t say that Moses was to blame or that Billington was deceived.The elections office quickly wrote to Moses explaining she was permanently banned. “Absent a change in state law, future attempts to register to vote anywhere in Tennessee may be considered a class D felony,” read the letter from Linda Phillips, the election administrator in Shelby county.Later that evening, Phillips expressed concern that she hadn’t received a reply from Moses. “I am a bit concerned that Pamela Moses did not respond to my email telling her she would never be able to register to vote.” She hinted at concerns for her own safety over the issue, writing “I do have a concealed carry permit,” in an email to a member of the election commission.In a response to questions from the Guardian, Phillips said: “If incorrect information is provided to our office, intentionally or unintentionally, the state of Tennessee alerts us about the inaccuracies. That’s what happened in Ms Moses’s case.”She also defended the emails she and Collins sent after learning Moses was ineligible to vote.“Any email exchanges within [the elections commission] regarding announcements of Ms Moses’s ineligibility to vote should be perceived as urgent notice to ensure staff awareness, considering Ms Moses’s frequent and sometimes harassing visits to our offices,” she said.TimelineTimeline of Pamela Moses caseShowMarch 2014 After a felony conviction more than a decade earlier, Moses successfully has her right to vote restored.April 2015 Moses loses her voting rights again after she pleads guilty to several felonies, including tampering with evidence and perjury.July 2019 Moses is blocked from running for mayor of Memphis because of a prior felony conviction. A judge says she is still serving a probationary sentence from her 2015 conviction.August 2019 Shelby County Elections Commission tells Moses she is ineligible to vote and will be removed from voting rolls.September 2019 Probation office and local clerk fill out and approve a form saying Moses is eligible to vote. Election officials reject Moses’ request, telling her she is permanently banned from voting.November 2019 Moses is indicted for illegal registration and voting. She is arrested while traveling through customs at Chicago’s O’Hare airport. November 2021Moses is convicted of making false entries on an official registration or election document. January 2022 Moses is sentenced to six years in prison.February 2022 A judge orders a new trial for Moses, in part because of documents not turned over to her defense.April 2022 Prosecutors announce they are dropping charges against Moses.Two months later, prosecutors filed a 14-count indictment, charging Moses with illegally voting nearly a dozen times after her 2015 guilty plea. She was arrested at O’Hare airport while returning to the US from a trip abroad.Later, prosecutors offered her a deal, saying if she pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge she would get six months of unsupervised probation and no additional prison time. She refused.“It was about the principle to me,” Moses said. “I hadn’t done anything wrong. All I did was try to get my right to vote back and you don’t like me,” she said. “I was okay with going to jail if people could understand what this is really about. I don’t regret making that decision.”Just before the trial began, prosecutors dropped 12 of the 14 charges, declining to prosecute her for illegally voting. There was no evidence that anyone had told Moses she was ineligible to vote, and the fact that the elections office had sent her voter information made it harder to prove she knew.The trial began on 3 November 2021 and lasted just two days. A single question remained: did Moses knowingly trick Billington to falsely say she was off probation when he filled out the form?May, the assistant district attorney prosecuting the case, zeroed in on the numerous times after 2015 that Moses had asked courts to declare she was off probation and judges had rejected her requests.“It’s like a child going up to both her parents, ‘Gimme, gimme, gimme’ … They make the mistake and give it, even though they’d told no, no, no. It’s the same thing, she knew what she was doing on September 3rd,” he said at the trial. “She was desperate to try to get her rights restored, she wanted to run for mayor, whatever, she was desperate. She didn’t care, she was going to try anyway. This was her last stitch [sic] effort.”When Billington testified, he owned up to his mistake. But May argued Moses had deceived him, even though she was not in the room when he did his research and signed off on the form. Billington said Moses had told him she was off probation when she walked into the office and was acting impatient as he researched her case.Ferguson, Moses’s lawyer, argued that the state was punishing Moses for its own mistake. “If they can’t get it right, we can’t convict her for not getting it right,” he said in his closing argument.Ultimately the jurors found Moses guilty. In late January, W Mark Ward, the judge overseeing the case, sentenced Moses to six years in prison. Weirich, the prosecutor, said Moses had brought a trial and any harsh punishment on herself by refusing to take the plea.“I gave her a chance to plead to a misdemeanor with no prison time. She requested a jury trial instead. She set this unfortunate result in motion and a jury of her peers heard the evidence and convicted her,” she said at the time.Local reporters had been following Moses’s case, but in early February, it started to receive national attention. The Guardian published a story highlighting Moses’s punishment. The next evening, Rachel Maddow did a segment on Moses’s case, comparing her six-year sentence to those of white Trump supporters who had received lesser sentences for intentional acts of voting fraud. The New York Times, Washington Post and Associated Press, among other outlets, followed. Moses, detained in prison, didn’t know her case was getting more attention.Then, a few weeks later, new information came to light.Through a public records request, the Guardian obtained the result of an internal investigation from the Tennessee department of corrections looking into why Billington had signed off on Moses’s voting eligibility. The supervisors who had investigated squarely placed the blame on Billington for the error, undercutting the prosecution’s idea that Moses had deceived him into signing off on the form.Perhaps most significantly, Moses’s lawyers had never seen the document before – prosecutors hadn’t turned it over with all of the other evidence in the case. That lack of disclosure was potentially unconstitutional and entitled Moses to a new trial.The day after the Guardian published the document, Moses had a previously scheduled hearing to request a fresh trial. Judges rarely granted such requests – the hearing was supposed to be a formality on the way to an appeal. At any rate, that morning, Moses’s lawyer submitted the missing document to the court.Harsh punishments for Black Americans over voting errors spark outcry | The fight to voteRead moreRemarkably, Ward unexpectedly granted Moses’s request for a new trial. He said that the document should have been turned over to Moses’s lawyers before the initial trial and that he had erroneously allowed certain other evidence to be admitted. Moses, who had been in jail, broke down in tears in the courtroom.It wasn’t the first time Weirich’s office has come under fire for failing to disclose evidence to a defendant. A 2014 study by the Fair Punishment Project found her office ranked first in Tennessee in prosecutorial misconduct. Weirich sought to distance herself from the error. The department of corrections, not her office, was to blame for not turning over the missing document, she said.Two months later, Weirich announced she would drop all charges against Moses. “She has spent 82 days in custody on this case, which is sufficient,” she said in a statement, also noting Moses remained permanently barred from voting. “In the interest of judicial economy, we are dismissing her illegal registration case and her violation of probation.”Both Weirich and Ward would go on to lose their re-election bids in August.Moses’s case may have prompted a national outpouring of disapproval, but tendentious-seeming voter fraud charges have not disappeared.In August, for instance, Florida governor Ron DeSantis announced the state was prosecuting 19 people with prior criminal records for voter fraud. Many of the people charged said they were confused about their eligibility and that no one had told them they couldn’t vote.Crystal Mason, a Black woman in Texas, is still appealing a five-year prison sentence for casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 election while on supervised release for a federal felony. Mason has said she had no idea she was ineligible, and the ballot had even been rejected.Moses, as well as those who have followed her case, doubt that it will be one of the last.Both the Shelby county elections commission and the Tennessee department of corrections declined to say whether they had changed their processes for helping people determine their voting eligibility in the wake of Moses’s case. “Any changes in that process would be done at the state level,” Phillips said.One morning at the end of April, just after the charges were dropped against her, Moses held a press conference at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. She was there to speak publicly for the first time about Weirich’s decisions to drop the charges against her.“When it comes to Black people in the south, whatever we do, if it’s wrong, you’ve got to pay for it,” she said. “If there was a white person and I got treated the way I did, I would be just as upset. But you don’t see white people getting treated like that.”Since her case was dropped Moses has been working on an album and documentary, and she’s continued to push to be able to vote again.She’s still seeking a gubernatorial pardon from her 2015 conviction is suing Tennessee to try to get the state’s felon disenfranchisement law declared unconstitutional. She’s also suing local officials for damages in her voter fraud case. “I don’t know what the future holds, but I do know I will get to vote again,” she said.“I want people to take away that it’s not over just because Pamela is free,” said Dawn Harrington, Moses’s friend.” Because there are so many other Pamelas all across the state.”Brandon Dill contributed reporting from MemphisTopicsTennesseeThe fight for democracyLaw (US)US politicsUS prisonsUS voting rightsRaceMemphisfeaturesReuse this content More

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      in Elections

      Tennessee man accused of plot to kill FBI agents in latest January 6 charges

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      Tennessee man accused of plot to kill FBI agents in latest January 6 chargesPair allegedly had list of 37 law enforcement agents they planned to assassinate In the latest in an ever-growing list of criminal charges brought against January 6 rioters, a Tennessee man was arrested on Friday for allegedly plotting to kill the FBI agents who were investigating him.With the House of Representatives committee on the insurrection preparing to deliver its final recommendations on Monday, 34-year old Edward Kelley of Maryville was charged with conspiracy, retaliating against a federal official and solicitation to commit a crime of violence, reported CNN.Kelley was already facing charges of assaulting an officer during his participation in the 6 January riots.Exclusive: January 6 panel considering Trump referral to justice department for obstruction of CongressRead moreAustin Carter, from Knoxville, Tennessee, was also arrested and charged for his involvement in the plot, according to the justice department.The two men allegedly had a list of 37 law enforcement agents they planned to assassinate, including the agents who arrested Kelley in May for his involvement in the January 6 attack and those who were present for a search of his home, reported the New York Times.An unnamed acquaintance, who alerted law enforcement to Kelley’s plans, obtained the list from Carter, as well as a thumb drive from Kelley’s home that showed a video of law enforcement officers approaching his home on the day of his arrest, according to court papers.The acquaintance also captured several recordings of Kelley and Carter talking about their assassination plans. At one point, Kelley asked the acquaintance to “stash some stuff” at his home, later clarifying that he meant weapons and ammunition. Kelley also told the acquaintance he planned to recruit people to attack the FBI’s Knoxville office, according to the papers.Carter allegedly told the acquaintance about his plans to participate in Kelley’s plot, urging the acquaintance “to definitely make sure you got everything racked, locked up and loaded”.Also on Friday, another January 6 rioter who is a QAnon supporter and self-described “poster boy” of the insurrection was sentenced to five years in prison.Douglas Jensen, 43, of Iowa was sentenced to 60 months, after a judge ruled that he had led rioters into the breached Capitol building and toward the police officer Eugene Goodman, actions that could have led to mass death, reported the Washington Post.The developments are just the latest in a meticulous and effective law enforcement investigation that has aimed to hold the January 6 attackers to account. As of 7 December, 964 people had been arrested for their involvement in the insurrection, charged with a number of crimes including assault on an officer, destruction of government property and theft, reported Insider.The list of those arrested for their involvement is expected to grow as the FBI continues to look through media and footage from the Capitol attacks.Of the 964, about half – 465 – have pled guilty. The longest sentence to date has been for former the NYPD officer Thomas Webster, who got 10 years in prison in September after a judge ruled he assaulted an officer with a metal flagpole when the officer tried to defend the Capitol.Meanwhile, the separate House investigation into the attacks is aiming to issue its formal recommendations on Monday. It is reportedly considering several criminal referrals against Donald Trump, which could include suggested charges of obstruction of an official proceeding of Congress and conspiracy to defraud the United States.TopicsUS Capitol attackUS politicsTennesseenewsReuse this content More

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      Pamela Moses sues officials after voter fraud conviction overturned

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      Pamela Moses sues officials after voter fraud conviction overturnedTennessee woman was serving six-year sentence before prosecutors’ withholding of crucial document came to light A Tennessee woman who had a six-year prison sentence for voter fraud overturned this year is suing state and local officials for damages, claiming she was wrongfully prosecuted and incarcerated.Judge dismisses fraud case against Texas man who waited seven hours to voteRead morePamela Moses, a 44-year-old Memphis activist, was sentenced to six years in prison in January after prosecutors said she tried to register to vote knowing she was ineligible because of a prior felony conviction. She was convicted even though two government officials, including a probation officer who conceded he made an error, signed off on a state form affirming her eligibility. The case prompted national outrage .Moses’s conviction was overturned by a judge in February after the Guardian published documents underscoring the probation department’s error. Prosecutors did not turn over the document, an internal email from Tennessee’s department of correction blaming the probation officer for the error, to Moses’s defense before her trial.Moses spent 82 days in jail before her conviction was overturned. The prosecution caused her “mental anguish, emotional distress, stress, anxiety, embarrassment, humiliation and demoralization”, her lawyers wrote in a complaint filed in federal court last week.In 2015, Moses pleaded guilty to several felonies, causing her to lose her right to vote. But no one told her she was ineligible to vote and election officials never removed her from the rolls. It wasn’t until 2019, when Moses got into a dispute with election officials about her eligibility to run for mayor, that authorities noticed their error.Moses, believing she had completed probation, tried to register to vote. The local clerk and probation office signed off on her eligibility, even though Moses was still on probation for her felony. In Tennessee, a conviction for tampering with evidence – which is one of the offenses Moses pleaded guilty to in 2015 – permanently strips offenders of their right to vote.Moses accused Amy Weirich, the district attorney who handled the case, of knowingly withholding evidence that could have exonerated her. Weirich said earlier this year that the department of correction had not provided the document to her office. A spokesperson for the department said in February there was a “lack of recognition of the scope” of the documents that had been requested.Moses’s case is one of several instances recently in which prosecutors have levied voter fraud charges against people with felony convictions only to see the cases be dismissed months later. In Florida, a Miami man who was among 19 charged with voting fraud in a suite of cases heralded by Ron DeSantis had his case dismissed on Friday. In Texas, a judge also dismissed charges last week against Hervis Rogers, a Houston man who waited hours in line to vote and was charged with voter fraud because of a prior criminal conviction. Moses is the first defendant to sue prosecutors after her case was dismissed.She likely faces an uphill battle in court.“Suits about failure to disclose exculpatory evidence do face a high burden, as the supreme court underscored in the recent case of Connick v Thompson,” said Jeffrey Welty, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s school of government. He said he had not followed Moses’s case closely enough to opine on its merits, but in general, he said, “the court said that a plaintiff can’t just show a single incident of non-disclosure but must show a policy of deliberate indifference to defendants’ rights.“It looks like another part of the suit might allege malicious prosecution,” he added. “That requires a plaintiff to show that they were prosecuted without probable cause and with malice, which requires that the prosecution be brought in bad faith or for an improper purpose. The requirement of malice can be difficult to establish since the normal assumption is that when prosecutors charge people with crimes, they’re just doing their jobs.”Weirich, a Republican, lost her re-election bid last month to Steve Mulroy, a Democrat who brought up Moses’s case frequently on the campaign trail.The district attorney’s office did not immediately return a request for comment.Tennessee has some of the most restrictive laws in the US when it comes to restoring voting rights for people with felonies. About 471,592 people in the state, and more than 21% of its Black voting age population, cannot vote because of a felony, according to an estimate by the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice non-profit.TopicsTennesseeThe fight to voteUS politicsUS crimenewsReuse 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

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      in US Politics

      Slew of trigger laws kick in as three more US states ban abortions

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      Slew of trigger laws kick in as three more US states ban abortionsTennessee, Texas and Idaho join eight other states as millions of women will lose access to abortion and in certain cases doctors will be punished for performing procedure A slew of trigger bans across three US states kicked in on Thursday as Tennessee, Texas and Idaho join eight other states that have formally outlawed abortion since the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in June.Depending on the state, trigger laws are designed to take effect either immediately following the overturn of Roe or 30 days after the supreme court’s transmission of its judgment, which took place on 26 July.Currently, nearly one in three women between the ages of 15 to 44 live in states where abortion has been banned or mostly banned. According to data obtained by the US census, that is nearly 21 million women affected.“More people will lose abortion access across the nation as bans take effect in Texas, Tennessee and Idaho. Vast swaths of the nation, especially in the south and midwest, will become abortion deserts that, for many, will be impossible to escape,” Nancy Northup, CEO of the Center of Reproductive Rights, said in a statement.“Evidence is already mounting of women being turned away despite needing urgent, and in some cases life-saving, medical care. This unfolding public health crisis will only continue to get worse. We will see more and more of these harrowing situations, and once state legislatures reconvene in January, we will see even more states implement abortion bans and novel laws criminalizing abortion providers, pregnant people, and those who help them,” she added.Thursday’s trigger bans strip away the right to abortion access for millions of women in Tennessee, Texas and Idaho and in certain cases punish doctors and healthcare providers for performing the procedure.In Tennessee, the state’s previous abortion law that bans the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy has been replaced with a stricter law. Aside from the exception of preventing the mother’s death or permanent bodily injury, the law bans abortion completely. It does not make any exceptions for victims of incest or rape.The law, called the Human Life Protection Act, makes it a felony for those who are caught performing or attempting to perform an abortion. Consequences include fines, prison time and the loss of voting rights.According to the law, abortions are prohibited from being performed based on mental health claims, including claims that the woman may “engage in conduct that would result in her death or substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function”.Texas, which already passed one of the nation’s strictest abortion laws last yearbanning the procedure beyond six weeks of pregnancy and offering no exceptions for incest or rape, will see a new trigger law take effect that makes the provision of abortion a first-degree felony. Consequences include life sentences and a civil penalty of $100,000 for each violation.“The criminal penalties will further chill the provision of care to women who need it,” Elisabeth Smith, director of state policy and advocacy for the Center of Productive Rights, told the Washington Post.Texas’s trigger ban comes a day after a federal judge in the state blocked an order from the Biden administration issued in the wake of the supreme court’s overruling of Roe that required hospitals to provide emergency abortions.According to Judge James Hendrix, a Donald Trump-appointee, the US Department of Health and Human Services overreached in its guidance interpreting the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labour Act. The 1986 law, also known as Emtala, requires people to receive emergency medical care regardless of their ability to pay for the services.“That guidance goes well beyond EMTALA’s text, which protects both mothers and unborn children, is silent as to abortion, and preempts state law only when the two directly conflict,” Hendrix wrote in a 67-page ruling.The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, condemned the decision, calling it a “a blow to Texans”, and adding, “It’s wrong, it’s backwards, and women may die as a result. The fight is not over.”Abortions in Idaho were previously limited to a six-week period into pregnancy. However, Thursday’s trigger law completely prohibits abortion with the exceptions of reported cases of rape and incest and to prevent the death of the mother – but not necessarily to safeguard her health.The ban makes performing an abortion in any “clinically diagnosable pregnancy” a felony that is punishable by up to five years of jail time.Despite the sweeping ban, an Idaho judge barred the state at the 11th hour from enforcing its abortion ban in medical emergencies, making the ruling the exact opposite of Hendrix’s decision in Texas. The ruling from federal judge Lynn Winmill on Wednesday evening says that the state cannot prosecute anyone who performs an abortion in an emergency medical situation.“At its core, the supremacy clause says state law must yield to federal law when it’s impossible to comply with both. And that’s all this case is about,” Winmill wrote. “It’s not about the bygone constitutional right to an abortion,” he added.With such conflicting rulings, both cases could be appealed and the supreme court may be asked to intervene.TopicsRoe v WadeUS supreme courtAbortionRepublicansUS politicsTennesseeTexasnewsReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      Memphis prosecutor who charged Black woman over voting error loses re-election bid

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      Memphis prosecutor who charged Black woman over voting error loses re-election bidAmy Weirich stirred outrage for bringing criminal charges against Pamela Moses, whose conviction was subsequently overturned Amy Weirich, the Memphis prosecutor who stirred national outrage for bringing criminal charges against a Black woman for trying to register to vote, has lost her re-election bid.Republican candidates who deny 2020 election results win key primariesRead moreWeirich, a Republican who has been the district attorney general in Shelby county since 2011, lost to Democrat Steve Mulroy, a law professor at the University of Memphis and a former county commissioner.Weirich’s defeat marks a major victory for criminal justice reform advocates, who had pressured her office over its use of cash bail, diversity and decisions to try juveniles as adults.Earlier this year, Weirich trumpeted a criminal conviction and six-year prison sentence for Pamela Moses, who tried to restore her right to vote after a 2015 felony conviction. Tennessee’s rules for restoring voting rights are extremely confusing, and Weirich’s office brought charges against Moses even though a probation officer had signed off on a form saying she was eligible. Prosecutors argued she had deceived the officer into signing off on the form.But after the trial, the Guardian published a document showing that the Tennessee department of corrections had investigated the error and made no mention of deception. Instead, the department blamed the officer. Weirich’s office failed to turn over the document to Moses’ defense team before trial, leading a judge to take the extremely rare step of overturning her conviction and ordering a new trial. Weirich said her office was not to blame for the mistake because the department of corrections failed to give her office the document.It was not the first time Weirich had come under fire for failing to disclose evidence to a defendant – a 2017 study found her office had more instances of misconduct than any prosecutor in the state from 2010 to 2015. In 2017, she also accepted a private reprimand from the Tennessee board of professional responsibility for casting aspersions on a defendant’s decision not to testify during a murder trial.TopicsMemphisThe fight to voteUS politicsTennesseenewsReuse this content More

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      in Elections

      Tennessee Eighth Congressional District Primary Election Results 2022

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      Source: Election results and race calls from The Associated Press. The Times estimates the number of remaining votes based on historic turnout data and reporting from The Associated Press. These are only estimates and they may not be informed by official reports from election officials.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, Véronique Brossier, 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, Vivian Li, Rebecca Lieberman, Ilana Marcus, Jaymin Patel, Rachel Shorey, Charlie Smart, Umi Syam, Urvashi Uberoy, Isaac White and Christine Zhang. Reporting by Maya King; production by Amanda Cordero and Jessica White; editing by Wilson Andrews, Kenan Davis, Amy Hughes and Ben Koski. More