A History of Voter Suppression with Carol Anderson, Ep. 239
Carol Anderson is a historian and educator, and the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide (2016). Her latest book is One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy. It is a timely survey of the methods by which voting rights have been rolled back in this country following the 2013 Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder. Anderson exposes efforts at racially biased voter suppression, from photo ID requirement to gerrymandering to poll closures. One Person, No Vote is a clarion call to understand the reality of contemporary American electoral politics and the actual disenfranchisement of our citizens today.
Anderson spoke about her book with Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and former Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
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>> You're listening to "Library Talks." I'm your host, Aidan Flax-Clark.
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If you're listening to this on Sunday, I'm sure that you know the midterm elections are two days from now, and no matter what your political persuasion is, I'm sure you're really fired up. But if you needed even more of an excuse to know just how important your vote is, then today's show is for you. We've got Carol Anderson, whose new book is called "One Person, No Vote, How Voter Suppression is Destroying Democracy." In her last book, which was called "White Rage," Anderson wrote about how black progress in this country has been systematically impeded since the Civil War, and in her new book, she hones on a specific part of that, voter suppression. Anderson was at the Schaumberg Center for Research and Black Culture recently to talk about the book with Khalil Gibran Muhammad. Muhammad is the former director of the Schaumberg Center, and he's now a professor of history, race, and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.
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>> Good evening, everyone.
>> Good evening.
>> Great to be here, great to be back home, and, you know, hearing Dr. Anderson's resume, I was thinking, well, maybe if she writes an Afro-futuristic book a few years from now [laughter], then we'll have a different reality, rather than these horribly dystopic stories that turn out to be our truth.
>> Carol Anderson: I keep trying, but [laughter] --
>> It's really great to have you here this evening.
>> Carol Anderson: -- thank you, Khalil. Thank you.
>> So there's a lot to cover. Obviously, even reading the paper in -- when I came in this evening, she was in the dressing room, basically calling on the Lord, a higher power to help us figure out what is happening right now. And I think part of the brilliance of this new book, "One Person, No Vote" is to recognize that we've been here before, and that there's a long history of what we're facing. And so, part of the challenge that faces us is whether or not this is about a knowledge gap, a power gap, or something else. So I wanted to start with maybe asking a really big question that I think helps to put the frame of your incredible work in context, and that is, do we actually have a constitutional right to vote?
>> Carol Anderson: And that almost sounded like church, y'all [laughter]. It was like, mm-hmm [laughter]. So yes, we do, but see, this is where stuff gets hinky, and that's the, you know, very legal term, hinky [laughter]. Because there's not a constitutional amendment, like -- you know, Amendment Number Four, or the Sixth Amendment that says "You have the right to vote." Folks have been acting like there's some crazy leeway in there, but I look at it, and I see the Fifteenth Amendment. And that's the amendment that came into power in 1870, after the Civil War, and it was very clear. It said "the right to vote shall not be abridged by the state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." So I'm saying, right there in the Fifteenth Amendment, it says "the right to vote." But what has happened is that you have states who have acted like there's really not a constitutional right to vote, and that these folks aren't American citizens, but they are state citizens. And so, you have, like, Mississippi acting like you're a Mississippian, but you're not an American.
>> Mm-hmm.
>> Carol Anderson: And so, therefore, you are only able to get what Mississippi's going to give you, and that becomes part of this disjuncture that we're seeing, in terms of the way that rights are laid out. But the battle has been on this front of saying, "No, we are American citizens. As American citizens, we have the right to vote, period."
>> Yeah, so -- so part of the reason that I asked -- and I mentioned to Carol backstage that I would start with this question, because in some ways, the story that she's going to tell, and that she writes in the book is the story about how the states have interpreted this quite differently.
>> Carol Anderson: Mm-hmm.
>> That they, in fact, have the right to define who a voter is, and that the Fifteenth Amendment is actually not an affirmative right. It is a protection against the usurpation of your right on the basis of your race, color, or previous condition of servitude. So I'm going to read something that, in preparation for this conversation, I thought would be helpful to imagine what the Fifteenth Amendment might've been. And while it's not an abstraction in the sense that I'm just making something up, or that it's a philosophical exercise, this is actually an amendment by a Republican during the Reconstruction Period called the Wilson Amendment. And while it didn't -- it wasn't voted on, and therefore, didn't pass -- it did not become the text of the language of the Fifteenth Amendment, we can at least hear what an affirmative right to vote would've sounded like. "Among the citizens of the United States, in the exercise of the elective franchise, or in the right to hold office in any state on account of race." So it prohibited discrimination among the citizens of the United States in the exercise of the elective franchise, or in the right to hold office in any state on account of race, color, nativity, property, education, or creed. So what it did was, it extended the categories that protected the right to vote to what was not there, which was property and education, which as we well know, because key parts of the disenfranchisement. So let's start there.
>> Carol Anderson: Yeah.
>> Let's start with what we ended up with, with the Fifteenth Amendment, and the early history of voter suppression.
>> Carol Anderson: And I think that early history really goes to the Mississippi Plan of 1890, because that Mississippi Plan of 1890 -- and I know all of you are shocked that I'm going to start with Mississippi when I'm talking about voter suppression [laughter].
>> Also known as American Congo.
>> Carol Anderson: [Laughter] Hello. And what Mississippi did -- because you had all of these black folks who were voting, and you had -- not only did you have black folks voting, but you were getting some black elected officials. And Mississippi was like, no, no, we got to stop this. And so, what they did was, they started talking about -- we have to end corruption at the ballot box. We have to protect the integrity of the ballot box. And this is where I'm saying -- you know, they said Mark Twain said that "history may not repeat itself, but it sure do rhyme." Because you are hearing the rhymes, and that -- and so, the measures that Mississippi was going to put forth were measures that were a progressive measure, in order to make sure that democracy was strong, that they protected the integrity. What that meant was, how do you get rid of black folk, although the Fifteenth Amendment says you cannot discriminate on account of race? And so, what they decided to do was to go after the societally-imposed characteristics that African-Americans had, and then make that the litmus test -- societally-imposed characteristics. Poverty -- after centuries of slavery, unpaid labor -- let me be real clear, unpaid. And then coming out of the Civil War, and having the 40 acres reneged upon, then having black codes, then having sharecropping, poverty was real, and so, what Mississippi said was, "You know, democracy is expensive, and, you know, you have these elections. And you got to have a place to hold the elections, and you got to have people who are counting the ballots, taking the ballots, and people who are counting the ballots. That's all expensive. And so, if you are really invested in democracy, you would be willing to pay a small fee, a poll tax." And now -- and so -- and people are like, oh, okay, that sounds reasonable, except the way that this thing was implemented, again, is that, one, it was paid in cash. If you're a sharecropper, you don't get cash until when the harvest comes in. Then, you didn't quite know when to pay it, or where to pay it, because the rules weren't quite clear. C. Van Woodward [assumed spelling] called them "arcane." You know, it was like, on the first day of the third month, except in years divisible by nine, but not by six [laughter].
>> It would be funny, right?
>> Carol Anderson: Yeah.
>> It would be funny if it weren't the present, too.
>> Carol Anderson: Yeah, right? And -- and the poll tax was cumulative. So you owed the poll tax when you were eligible to vote, which was 21, but say it took you 20 years to figure this out -- you know, on which day of which month, and where I'm supposed to pay it. You owed 20 years of back poll taxes before you could pay. Now, the average family income in Mississippi was $100 a year for farm families, and that was most of the folk -- $100 a year for the family. So begin to think about -- you have to take a percentage of your annual family income, a significant percentage --
>> Well, it was -- you -- I think you pointed out it's either one or two dollars, right?
>> Carol Anderson: -- mm-hmm, yeah.
>> So while -- I mean, if you could imagine right now taking 2% of your income just to vote is not insubstantial.
>> Carol Anderson: Right, at all, and so, you had -- but it sounds, again, reasonable. The other one that to me is a big one was the literacy test. And what it said was, "You know, we really think that people who are voting should really understand the rules, the laws of the place where they are voting. They ought to understand the foundational legal principles upon which our state and our nation was built. And so," they said, "all you have to do is just read a section of the Constitution." Now, that might sound okay, except we know that these places significantly underfunded black schools. On average, by 1940, the NAACP figured out that white schools were getting 252% more per student in funding. In Mississippi, it was 751%, and many black school systems did not have high schools. So by the time we're in 19 -- in the 1940s, more than 50% of African-American adults in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina had less than five years of formal Jim Crow education -- more than 50%. Now, read the Constitution, and interpret it to the liking of the registrar. The combination of the poll tax and the literacy test, mixed with election-day terrorism, meant that by the time we got to 1940, only 3% of African-American adults were registered to vote in the south -- 3%. That's how powerful disenfranchisement was.
>> Can I read for them just -- so it's not just the Constitution as we know it. These are actually literacy tests of state constitutions, and the state constitutions are far more arcane, because the machinery of law is in the state constitutions that govern most of our lives, not in the federal constitution. And so, here is section 260 that Carol mentions, who says "You have to not only read this, but then interpret it." "The income arising from the 16th-section trust fund, the surplus revenue fund, until it is called for by the United States government, and the funds enumerated in sections 257 and 258 of this constitution, together with a special annual tax of 30 cents on each $100 of taxable property in this state. Which the --" you get the point [laughter]. So it's a funding formula for the -- both how property taxes are assessed for schools, and the limits upon which the taxing authority was enumerated.
>> Carol Anderson: But you can imagine, again, only having five years of formal Jim Crow education, and being handed that, and told to interpret it as if you had a Harvard J.D. I mean, this is what this was designed to do. But understand, too, that because they didn't target race -- they targeted the societally-imposed conditions -- the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the poll tax and the literacy test were constitutional.
>> Right, and see, here's an interesting intersection with the Fifteenth Amendment, even before we get to the Nineteenth, or the Twenty-Fourth, or the Twenty-Sixth, which is that the states could determine based on federalism, or the Tenth Amendment, what the rules were governing who voted. What they could not do, based on the Fifteenth Amendment, was to restrict the vote because of a person's race, color, or previous condition, and then eventually because of their gender, or sex, or eventually because of their age. So that's the tension, and that longer history between the Fifteenth Amendment and the Twenty-Sixth Amendment is precisely the story that is playing out today.
>> Carol Anderson: Yes, absolutely. I mean, and this is -- so what we're seeing is by the time we get to -- so we get to 1957, Civil Rights Act, because this is when the federal government is finally going to try to do something. But understand that what was prompting this something is that you have the Civil Rights Movement beginning. It began '54, '55, unless you're doing the long Civil Rights Movements.
>> We do the long one here.
>> Carol Anderson: Okay [laughter]. Okay. But -- and by '57, you have Little Rock blowing up, and that is when you have nine African-American honors students integrating Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas. And Governor Orval Faubus wanted to make his mark, and so he decided to make his stand by calling out the National Guard, and blocking these children from getting an education, even though there was a Supreme Court ruling in '54 -- Brown -- and '55 -- Brown 2. So this was -- and when Little Rock blew -- you know, and the U.S. is trying to do its swag thing in the Cold War as the leader of the free world. This wasn't looking so free. As I said -- you know, I said you cannot be the Jim Crow leader of the free world [laughter]. One of these things is not like the other, right? And so, the U.S. tried to square that circle with the Civil Rights Act in 1957, allowing people to actually litigate, to go to court and sue when their voting rights had been violated. But there was a fundamental flaw in that process -- many fundamental flaws. One was, okay, say you're black and you're in Mississippi, and your voting rights have been violated -- just a hypothetical [laughter]. And what you do is, then you sue the white Mississippian for violating your voting rights. Now, there has to be an investigation. That's going to take 17 months or so, on average. Then there's the trial. Then there's the verdict. Then there's the appeal. Then there's the -- meanwhile, you have multiple elections going on where the folks who have come to power, based on massive disenfranchisement, are in power, writing the rules to continue to disenfranchise.
>> And one other part of that you tell is that, in -- often, the defendant in the case, who is the county clerk or the registrar --
>> Carol Anderson: Mm-hmm.
>> -- was the person who can actually be sued for such shenanigans, is, what, removed from office?
>> Carol Anderson: Yes.
>> And it makes the entire legal process moot.
>> Carol Anderson: And so you got to start all over again, right? And meanwhile, you're sitting there in Mississippi suing. You've got a target on your back like nobody's business. I mean, this thing did not work. It was so clear that it did not work, and -- but the movement is going on. And folks are fighting for the right to vote, and we see that.
>> So talk a little bit -- and this is where -- you don't talk about it in the book, but because you're such an amazing scholar, and have written so broadly about human rights struggles. So your first book, "Eyes on the Prize" -- or "Eyes off the Prize," I'm sorry --
>> Carol Anderson: Mm-hmm, yeah.
>> -- is about the struggle of basically anti-communism within the Civil Rights Movement, impacting the more radical efforts to call the United States out in the context of the nascent United Nations.
>> Carol Anderson: Yes.
>> And so, just maybe set the frame -- because you talked about the Cold War. You talked about the pressure of the Cold War to make possible certain developments, but I think that's an important marker, mostly because I think the lack of an external foe on the scale of the Soviets, I think, has contributed to the crisis that we face now. So we'll come back to that, but I think the setup for that is in partly the story that you've told in your first book.
>> Carol Anderson: Yeah, so in "Eyes off the Prize, the United Nations and the African-American Struggle for Human Rights," what I'm laying out is that, in the early '40s, the NAACP and other black activists understood that the struggle for black equality was not simply a civil rights issue. It was a human rights issue. They understood that the right to vote was absolutely essential, but you had to have good schools. You had to have the right to education. You had to have the right to healthcare. You had to have the right to a living wage. You had to have the right to decent housing.
>> And a right to be free of state violence.
>> Carol Anderson: Yes. You know, the right not to be lynched -- I mean, it's a little thing, but dag gone it, right? You know -- and so, they're laying this out in terms of what this human rights structure would look like, and they're fighting. They're fighting hard for it. They're fighting all the way into the UN, into that initial UN meeting, where it was the angling between the NAACP and the American Jewish Congress that forced the U.S. delegation to insert human rights into the UN charter. I mean, the U.S. did not want to do it, because it had those powerful southern Democrats down there, saying, "We don't believe in human rights." No kidding, right? And so, I mean -- and so -- but with that then being asserted into the UN charter -- because, remember, a legal treaty, a treaty, when the U.S. signs it, becomes the law of the land. And so, this is why the southern Democrats were fighting it so hard, because this charter would become the law of the land when the U.S. signed off on it. And having this, like -- we believe in human rights, and, you know, we will fight for human rights. They're like, uh-unh. So John Foster Dulles, who was on the U.S. delegation, was like, I got this. I got this. So in addition to inserting it in the treaty, he also then inserted the domestic jurisdiction clause, Article 2, Section 7, which says that "nothing in this charter shall -- the UN doesn't have to do anything" -- no, no, "it doesn't have to happen because of domestic" -- I'm blanking on the clause now, dog. How do you remember Article 2, Section 7, and blank out on the language?
>> Right [laughter].
>> Carol Anderson: Right [laughter]? But it's that nothing in this charter shall -- will require the UN to do anything that in -- violates what is essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of the state involved. What that meant was, is that the UN could not do anything on a human rights charge unless the state said, "Okay, come and look at us. Yeah, we know we messed up with our folk, and we need your help." So as long as the state involved that is violating human rights, you know, didn't call for UN help, there was -- the UN had absolutely no authority.
>> Oh, wow.
>> Carol Anderson: And so, the NAACP kept fighting that thing all the way. It issued a treaty -- not a treaty, a petition to the UN, documenting beautifully the massive human rights violations that African-Americans had faced since 1787, and, ooh, that thing got stomped. And when it got stomped down, Eleanor Roosevelt was key to quashing that petition. Mm-hmm [laughter]. Shocking. And that is -- you know, and it was -- this was the Cold War, and she said, "We can't have you coming up here airing our dirty laundry. What are you doing?"
>> Oh, no.
>> Carol Anderson: And just broke that petition, and basically then told Walter White, the head of the NAACP, "Only a communist-dominated group would've pulled a stunt like that." So you begin to see the power of the Cold War in then forcing African-Americans to retreat from this human rights platform. She resigned from the NAACP Board of Directors right after this meeting, and remember, this is in '48. So we don't have Brown yet, and the NAACP knows what her name on their letterhead means. It can open doors that would otherwise be closed. And so, when she resigned, and Walter White is doing the James Brown, "Please, please," [laughter], you know, Eleanor, please don't go. And it took a minute, and she finally agreed to stay. And the NAACP backed off of its human rights platform.
>> I think the -- that story does a couple things for us. One, it demonstrates that the radical black left that had basically come out of the 1930s with its essentially participation in larger socialist and communist international conversations, as well as activism, people like Paul Robison really helping to shape a conversation within the United States about it. Secondly, it talks about the relationship of the fight in the European theater with regard to the fight against fascism. And so, when we -- the reason this matters is because the degree to which the African-American or the black critique of fascism in the United States, both coming out of World War II, as well as going into the UN, which is a product of essentially preventing World War III. The United States does two things, as you described. One, it closes ranks domestically, therefore suppressing, or in this case repressing black radicalism, but secondarily, the crumbs that come out of this Cold War moment, or this consolidating Cold War moment, are precisely the 1957 Civil Rights Act, or the kinds of things that Truman does in 1948. Which, in some ways, demonstrate the degree to which the nation is managing its racism problem on a global stage, rather than dealing with it.
>> Carol Anderson: Yes, and that is really what is happening in this moment, because the Soviets are having a field day. I mean, they are having a field day. Like, Little Rock, they were like, "Look at that." I mean, and I've got it in the book. Yeah, look at that. They've got -- they're -- have got bayonets on children, you know, and what do you say? It's true. You know, so they -- you know, the State Department's trying to do -- this is propaganda, but they can't say this is propaganda because they got bayonets on children. And you're seeing -- and not only were you hearing this from the Soviets, you were also getting this from the allies, the folks that the U.S. wanted to be in the western camp. And they're like, oh, ooh, you know, and the U.S. is like, no, no, really, really. And they're like -- and so, there's that 1957 Civil Rights Act. The 1957 -- as I said, the '57 Civil Rights Act, though, couldn't do it, and we still had these incredible acts of violence. And one of those acts of violence -- and a series of acts of violence happened in Selma, in that battle for the right to vote. What you're seeing there in Alabama in the early '60s is that you have some counties, majority black counties, where there are zero African-Americans registered to vote, zero, like Lowndes County, that gives us the home of the Black Panther -- yeah.
>> Yeah, yeah, the first -- the first Panther Party.
>> Carol Anderson: The first Panther Party, right? And you have -- and while you have zero African-Americans registered to vote in Lowndes County, you have over 100% -- more than 100% of whites registered to vote in Lowndes County.
>> No, that's remarkable, and it's remarkable today to read that in so many of these counties that become ground zero for the sheer terror that keeps African-Americans from the polls is that they are majority populations within counties.
>> Carol Anderson: Yes.
>> That, of course, have never had political representation, which again becomes part of the record that will eventually lead to the Voting Rights Act. One of the things I wanted to ask you to maybe talk a little bit about is that violence, because it seems to me one of the connections that you make to our contemporary moment -- I couldn't help but think about it. Part of the strategy of the Trump administration with regard to immigrant family separation --
>> Carol Anderson: Yes, Lord.
>> -- is to create a climate of fear and intimidation --
>> Carol Anderson: Yes.
>> -- that will, according to their own engineers, or architects of this draconian policy, is that people will, quote unquote, "self-deport," because the situation will be so horrible and horrific in their mind that the deterrent effect will essentially achieve the same goal.
>> Carol Anderson: Mm-hmm.
>> And I couldn't help but think about that term self-deport, because in some ways, the stories that you tell coming out of the Jim Crow period leading to the 1960s and the, you know, formal stage, or the classic stage of the Civil Rights Movement is really about self-disenfranchisement --
>> Carol Anderson: Yes.
>> -- that the circumstances are so high, the violence is so real, that people simply choose not to put themselves in harm's way. So maybe just talk a little bit about that intimidation and fear.
>> Carol Anderson: So I'll tell the story of Maceo Snipes. It was 1946 in Georgia. Maceo was a veteran, and veterans were really important, because, one, black veterans had been fighting the fascist. They had been fighting Nazis, and they were getting a taste. And they were fighting under the banner of the Atlantic Charter -- freedom from fear, freedom from want. This was a war for democracy. This was a war against Aryan supremacy. They were fighting -- I mean, they were --
>> The Fifth Freedom, right, as they called it.
>> Carol Anderson: -- yes, right. Yeah. And so, there they are, and I mean, they -- and so, when you -- particularly when you look at the movement, you will see black veterans all over it. Because they came back to the U.S., and they weren't having it. I mean, they weren't having it. They were going to get some of that democracy that they had fought for overseas. They were going to get some of that at home. This is why you see the mass wave of lynchings that happened in '45, and '46, and '47.
>> They were often targeted at uniformed soldiers.
>> Carol Anderson: Yes. Yeah, and this was -- and you'll see veterans -- so there was, like, John Jones, who was blowtorched and dismembered in Minden, Louisiana. There was the quadruple lynching in Monroe, Georgia. There was Maceo Snipes, and Maceo was a veteran. And he came back home to Georgia, and he was ready to vote, because he knew he was an American citizen, right? Because he had fought as an American citizen, and one of the things that American citizens can do -- they can vote. And this was an election in 1946 where you had Eugene Talmadge running for governor. He had been governor before, and he wanted it again. And he ran on the banner of keep the N's where they belong.
>> Wow.
>> Carol Anderson: And one of the things that he meant by that, is that, in 1944, in the Smith v. Allwright decision, the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down the white primary, said it was unconstitutional. That was one of the programs that was in the Mississippi Plan of 1890. What the white primary did is that the south was the solid Democratic south. Whoever won the primary, they were going to win the general election. So the primary was key, and so they had rules that said only whites could vote in the Democratic primary. Now -- [laughter] it took four Supreme Court cases, starting in 1923, until we get to 1944, before the Supreme Court says, "Okay, y'all, stop. This is unconstitutional." And so, Eugene Talmadge ran on the banner of "I'm going to reinstitute the white primary in Georgia." And he told his followers, "You know, if you explain it to the negro just right, I don't think they're going to want to vote." And this is why you see a wave of lynching coming through Georgia in this moment, wave of violence. Maceo was like, I'm an American citizen. I'm going to go vote. And so he goes down to Taylor County, in Taylor County, where -- to cast a -- and there's a sign up there saying, "The first negro that votes, that'll be the last thing he ever does."
>> Oh, wow.
>> Carol Anderson: And Maceo's like -- I survived World War II. What's Georgia got? And so, he just -- he walks in. He casts his ballot. He was the only black person in Taylor County who voted, and nothing happened for a while. Few days later -- and he goes to the door, and they're like, would you mind stepping out on the porch? He's like, sure. And he steps out on the porch and hears -- it was a firing squad. And they mowed Maceo down, and then they just went -- and walked away, because you know nothing happened to them. But Maceo's mother ran out the house, and she saw her baby there on the porch, riddled with bullets, and she picked that man up, and just basically dragged him to the hospital. But in 1946, black people don't have the right to healthcare, because this is a Jim Crow hospital. And so, they were like -- and so they put him in the room a size of a closet, where he sat for six hours, bleeding to death, before anybody even looked at him. Took him two days to die.
>> Yeah, no, it's a --
>> Carol Anderson: That's that kind of violence.
>> -- right. And so, that moment, we know pretty well the degree to which the intimidation eventually leads to a clear focus in the galvanization of a number of civil rights organizations that will first culminate in the Civil Rights Act of '64. That great violence and intimidation sort of moving things --
>> Carol Anderson: Mm-hmm.
>> -- and then the Voting Rights Act of '65.
>> Carol Anderson: Yes.
>> So I think the rest of our time, we want to really understand how we got from that moment of '65, which was a moment that finally reflected on this entire 75-year history of every trick in the book to keep black people from the polls. But you tell a story that essentially -- as soon as the ink had dried on the legislation, the effort to undo it began. So let's pick it up there.
>> Carol Anderson: Yeah. So you get South Carolina. South Carolina basically said, "We don't recognize that the Voting Rights Act is constitutional. They are violating states' rights, and so we have the right to have a literacy test. I don't care that the Voting Rights Act said you can't have a literacy test, and we resent having federal electors here at our polling stations making sure we're not using the literacy test." And so, South Carolina sued, and the U.S. Supreme Court came back -- this is when we had a real one.
>> Mm-hmm.
>> Carol Anderson: And the U.S. Supreme Court came back -- yeah, I said it [laughter].
[ Applause ]
And the U.S. Supreme Court came back and said, "Not today, Satan. Uh-unh." And said, "The evil and pernicious --" now, you know, when the Supreme Court writes in its decision the word "evil," I think I'm okay in saying "not today, Satan." Right [laughter]? That the kind of disenfranchisement that was happening -- that is what the Voting Rights Act was designed to stop, stop in its tracks, and no, South Carolina, we have the right -- when you're messing up, when you're messing with American citizens' right to vote, we've got the right to come in there and stop you. I was like -- I'm telling you, that was my Supreme Court, right [laughter]? Then --
>> Well, just tell them -- and I should've asked you this directly. So tell them exactly what the Voting Rights Act enshrines in law.
>> Carol Anderson: -- yes. And so, what the Voting Rights Act does -- and it's beautiful, because it flipped, like, the Civil Rights Act of '57 on its head. Instead of allowing these folks to create these crazy-butt laws to stop folks from voting, and then requiring the person to be responsible for trying to lift up the Fifteenth Amendment, it requires the states to actually uphold the Fifteenth Amendment. Wow. And so, it requires that, for states who have a history of discrimination -- and that's judged by having fewer than 50% of your age-eligible adults registered to vote, and that you've used one of these tests, like a poll tax, a literacy test. Those two combined means that you come under the Department of Justice's pre-clearance jurisdiction. Any voting law you want to change has to be okayed by the U.S. Department of Justice, or by the federal court in D.C. That's why the south was like, oh, man, because now they couldn't run hog wild. So everything that they wanted to change and do now had to be pre-cleared. Voting Rights Act actually worked. Early 1960, you could -- you had fewer than 10% of all African-Americans in Mississippi registered to vote. By 1967, '68, you had almost 60%.
>> Yeah, you say here 66.9%.
>> Carol Anderson: Yeah, I mean, just, wow.
>> Yeah.
>> Carol Anderson: Wow. Wow.
>> From 4.3%.
>> Carol Anderson: Wow. I mean, that -- that's the kind of power and impact -- and that is why South Carolina -- then Mississippi and Virginia came back going, okay, that full-frontal assault thing didn't work, so we're going to be smooth with it. So what we're saying is, no, we're not -- we get that we can't use a poll tax or a literacy test. We get it, but these minor tweaks really shouldn't require all of that paperwork. It's so burdensome to have the DOJ look at these small tweaks, tweaks like -- things like we used to have to vote for who our superintendent of schools would be, you know, because they haven't implemented Brown yet, and now we're going to make it an appointed position. Or we used to have these districts, and it was okay having districts -- you know, district one, district two, district three, where you choose your representatives. Because all of the black folks in those districts couldn't vote, but now that you have the Voting Rights Act, and you have this massive impact of voter registration, now Mississippi said, "Okay, we're going to go for at-large voting." What at-large voting does, then, is it just drowns all of those black votes in a sea of white voters.
>> I like drowns. I had thought about dilute, but I like drowns better. That's more like it.
>> Carol Anderson: Yeah, because, I mean, it just -- and then, what Virginia tried -- Virginia had implemented a new law, because Virginia did not believe in literacy. It shut down its public schools for years. It shut down its public schools, and provided nothing for black children in response to Brown. But provided taxpayer-funded tuition vouchers for white children to go to all-white private academies, in response to Brown. And so, what Virginia said was, "If you want to do -- write in a candidate's name, you have to write it in. You can't use a sticker. You can't use an X. You have to write it in." Well, if you haven't had schooling -- and they used to have -- before the Voting Rights Act, they used to have aides there, where aides could help those who were illiterate. Now, they removed the aides. So this was a way -- again, because they had targeted black schools. So this was a way, again, of using societally-imposed characteristics. Supreme Court said, "Not today, Satan. Not today."
>> You keep coming back to the issue of education, which I just --
>> Carol Anderson: Yes.
>> -- is important to put out there, because we as -- well, not we, but some people don't realize that there is no constitutional right to education, either. It is a privilege. Now, some states do enshrine the right to education, and many southern states had that right initially during Reconstruction, when black Republicans and their white northern allies passed laws for compulsory universal education. But of course, those laws were diluted, changed, repealed. The reason why I mention this is because you keep talking about Mississippi, but Mississippi is one of the few states that actually does not have a right to education today. It is not a right. So, nationally, at the federal level, in the United States of America, education is a privilege, not a right.
>> Carol Anderson: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And this is why it's hotly-contested ground.
>> Mm-hmm.
>> Carol Anderson: One of the reasons. And so, then, as the Supreme Court is setting this thing up -- no, it means small stuff and big stuff. You got to get it all approved. The states are still fighting, and having somebody like a Richard Nixon who doesn't believe in the Voting Rights Act, and particularly a Ronald Reagan who doesn't believe in the Voting Rights Act -- I mean, so you're getting these back-and-forth battles. We get up to 2013. Shelby -- in Shelby County, Alabama, Calera City -- Calera City had one lone black councilman for the city, and the Shelby County commissioners began to annex the land around Calera City, and then redrawing the council boundaries. When they redrew the council boundaries, the boundaries for the black councilman then moved to a district where 70 -- over 70% of the people who lived there had voted against Barack Obama. And so, now, they have this black councilman that they were getting ready to vote on. He didn't win the election. The DOJ said, "Hey, you changed all of these boundaries, and you didn't ask. You know you got to be pre-cleared." And they're like, "We're over that." And so, that case went up through the Supreme Court. John Roberts wrote a five-four decision. Clarence Thomas was in the five. I know that's shocking [laughter]. And the decision said, "You know, the kind of racism that required the Voting Rights Act really isn't operable in America anymore. You know, we're not in 1965. You know, that's not -- that's not who we are anymore. Look, we've got -- we've got black elected officials. We've got Latino elected officials. We've got a black voter turnout rate that in some cases is equalling or sometimes higher than whites. I mean, you know -- so that kind of racism just isn't operating anymore. So why on Earth would you need a Voting Rights Act? And, you know, the Voting Rights Act -- it's calcified. When you look at it, many of the same jurisdictions that came under the Voting Rights Act in '65 -- they're still there, under the Voting Rights Act in 2013. We have evolved. We have moved on, but the Voting Rights Act hasn't."
>> You point out that -- that in the Roberts -- in the arguments preceding the Shelby case, that the evidence of only, quote, "17 jurisdictions having been removed from pre-clearance out of a total of 12,000 covered jurisdictions" was used as evidence. Not of evolution -- I'm sorry, not of the stagnation of the efforts to basically suppress the black vote, but in fact as some kind of failure to recognize that these communities had, in fact, evolved. In other words, the 17 we see as evidence that, actually, they had earned their right to be removed, whereas the Roberts court saw it as an unfair stigma, or usurpation of those states' rights, because they had evolved.
>> Carol Anderson: Right. I mean -- and I'm looking at that going, you know -- because to be bailed out, you had to have five years of not discriminating against your folk. That's all you had to do. Quit acting a fool [laughter]. But they couldn't do it. Now, that's how I saw that. You've got five years you don't discriminate, and you cannot not discriminate? That's why you're under the Voting Rights Act, but that's not how John Roberts saw it. And Andy said that the Voting Rights Act was unfair to the south. It picked on the south. I'm like -- as if the south didn't do anything [laughter]. Right? You know -- as if -- oh, I don't know, there wasn't Maceo Snipes. Oh, I don't know. As if there wasn't a poll tax, as if there wasn't a literacy test --
>> Or that Alabama, which, as you point out, had been -- I mean, in some ways, the battleground of sort of where the most action had been fought before the VRA --
>> Carol Anderson: -- yes.
>> -- moves to Alabama after the VRA --
>> Carol Anderson: Yes.
>> -- and you tell these two instances of alleged voter fraud, and then Jeff Beauregard-Session's role in prosecuting black folks who were trying to support voter registration efforts.
>> Carol Anderson: Yes. I mean, so, yeah. Alabama was, like, ground zero, and because part of what had happened is, they had begun to flip the language of the suppression of the vote, this kind of voter fraud onto black people that -- where the fraud was, was actually black people trying to vote. And so, it was using the criminal justice system in the 1980s, in Alabama, to go after black people who were registering black folk to vote, and registering black folk to use the absentee ballot, which whites had been using to maintain political power, like in Perry County. And Jefferson Beauregard Sessions went after them with every -- and he went after Albert Turner, Sr. Albert Turner, Sr. was at Selma. Albert Turner, Sr. was a lieutenant of Martin Luther King. I mean, this is a man who has been in the civil rights war, and now he's coming up against Sessions.
>> And the full weight of the Department of Justice.
>> Carol Anderson: Oh, my God.
>> I mean, essentially, the same Department of Justice that you had described through the terms of the enactment of the VRA, to actually enforce the actual preclearance process. Now under a Reagan administration is empowering, basically, criminal charges against black people who are doing the work of registering black people, of actually making real the promise of the franchise.
>> Carol Anderson: Exactly, and one of the things that really comes through there -- so in that Jeff Sessions piece, he said that -- so what happened was, Albert Turner, Sr. figured out that absentee ballots was how whites were keeping power. Perry County is 40% black, and it has never had a black elected official by the time we're into early 1980. All right? So -- and he's like, how is this happening? And he figured out it was absentee ballots. And so, he goes down to the attorney general's office to learn how this whole -- all the rules, and ins and outs of using an absentee ballot, and then he takes that back into Perry County, and begins to mobilize folks to be able to use this. And it would really work for Perry County, because you had 48% between people who were 65 -- over 65, and had mobility issues, and you also had a large segment of the population that worked outside the county. So -- and the polls were only open for four hours a day on election day. So to be able to get there for those four hours was going to be tough, so absentee ballot was the way to go. The first time they did it, that was the first time they started getting black elected officials. The DA looked up and went, "Oh, voter fraud," and he called Jeff Sessions. So on the next election, Jeff Session calls in the FBI, and they follow Albert Turner, his wife, Evelyn, and a colleague of theirs, Steven Hogue [assumed spelling]. And so, as they deposit the absentee ballots in the mailbox, the FBI gets the mailbox and starts going through all of the absentee ballots, and thinks they have found forgeries. Jeff Session then rounds up over 20 of the elderly black people, and puts them on a bus, drives them down from Perry County here down to Mobile, here, escorted by Alabama State Troopers and the FBI. Now, you know what the police mean to black folk, and you know --
>> The po-lice.
>> Carol Anderson: -- the po-lice, and you know what they mean [laughter] -- and you know what it means when you're driven out of your home, and then the folks are fingerprinted, mug shots, and then they are interrogated. It is designed to intimidate, to instill fear, that this criminal justice system will come down on you if you vote. Then, based on that interrogation, they charged the Turners and Hogue with a series of election fraud.
>> So think about the universe that literally turns on itself when, for better part of a century, whites in control are committing crimes, breaking the law --
>> Carol Anderson: Killing.
>> -- in every manner preventing black folks from voting, but when black folks are actually using the legal machinery of the law to encourage voting, to expand democracy, they become criminalized.
>> Carol Anderson: Yes, and stop me if this sounds familiar about where we're living today, okay? And so, this is one I -- when I talk about Twain saying "history might not -- may not repeat itself, but it sure do rhyme" -- so this book begins to set up those rhythms, those rhymes, so that we can begin to see these patterns.
>> So I'm going to mention -- I want to talk about the resistance, because I don't want to leave people with a sense --
>> Carol Anderson: Yes.
>> -- because you tell -- you tell some pretty remarkable stories of what people have been doing. So just throw this out there. Sixteen million people have been struck from voter rolls since the Shelby case --
>> Carol Anderson: Sixteen.
>> -- between 14 and 16, according to the Brennan Center [assumed spelling]. There are currently 77 million unregistered voters in this country. It exceeds -- the number exceeds 100 of the largest cities in America by nearly 16 million people. So if you think of all these blue cities that we talk about, you add them all up together, and then plus 16 million, that would equal the number of people who are unregistered in this country. The percentages of people unregistered -- 42% are Latino, 43% are Asian, 31% are black, and 26% are white, in terms of relative terms. So the methods -- and I just want to put this out there, because in so many of the stories that you tell, you describe, I mean, just in sheer detail -- so this is just a list, because I want you to talk about the resistance. So here is she's going to talk about in our remaining time, about what has been going on. So there's gerrymandering, dilution through annexation, voter ID requirements, fraud cases based on intimidation, purging of voter. Most recently in Georgia under an exact-match ID scam in the case of Brian Kemp and Stacey Abrams, reidentification registration -- simply having to come and prove that you are who you are randomly, and in key, inconvenient times. Reducing access to the polls, moving sites, diminishing poll workers, lessening hours, making sure the machinery doesn't work or is out of date, the eligibility process going from long to short. Three weeks gives people a lot of time to -- in advance of an election to register. Same-day obviously is much better. Requiring a notary in an effort to ensure that your voter registration is legitimate, requiring by diminishing the polling sites, ensuring that in a place where there's no public transportation, that people won't be able to get around. Forcing people to go to local courthouses, which already have diminished hours, but are sites of the criminal justice system, and sites of trauma. And then, of course, we've said nothing -- nothing about felony disenfranchisement, which accounts for six million people currently, and in Florida alone, site of the 2000 presidential election, 1.4 million people. So tell us some good stories about what people are doing to fight all of this.
>> Carol Anderson: And so -- yeah, so that book almost sounds like a travelogue of horrors, but that last chapter's called "The Resistance." And I focus in on Alabama, and the Doug Jones/Roy Moore battle. Mm-hmm. And Alabama had deployed every method of voter suppression against this black population -- every method, and was proud of it.
>> You call it "a method of mass civic destruction."
>> Carol Anderson: Yes. Yes. That's exactly what it is. I'm going to quickly do felony disenfranchisement, because that gets me into talking about the power of civil society in the resistance. So in its Jim Crow constitution, Alabama wrote in its constitution a clause that said "if you have been convicted of a crime of moral turpitude, you will have lost your voting rights." Alabama refused to define moral turpitude, because, see, you can't --
>> So the president wouldn't -- I mean, it's a good thing he's not in Alabama, right [laughter]? Because surely, his picture would be right next to the definition.
[ Laughter ]
>> Carol Anderson: Yeah, you said it [laughter].
>> The hop -- the hypocrisy is astounding.
>> Carol Anderson: And it took civil society decades of taking Alabama to court for Alabama to finally define moral turpitude in 2017.
>> Whoa.
>> Carol Anderson: Murder, rape, treason -- yeah, you're right, the president [laughter], yeah. So -- and so, then -- so they passed a law with this definition. So then, civil society turned to Secretary of State John Merrill, and said, "All of those folks that you told couldn't vote, now go tell them that they can." And he said, "No, I don't think that's a good use of state resources." And so, civil society rose up, because by that time, overall, 8% of Alabama's adult population could not vote because of moral turpitude. Fifteen percent of its adult black population couldn't vote because of moral turpitude. So the Legal Society of Alabama and the ACLU got together, and they started first setting up restoration clinics. So they started sending out notices, both on social media and on the radio stations, because they knew they were dealing with a demographic difference. There are some folks who've been in for a while, who don't know social media. So they're never going to get the Facebook Tweet, or the Tweeter -- the Facebook post and the Twitter -- you can tell I'm listening to the radio [laughter]. And -- and then, they're like, "Hey, I know he told you that -- you know, Merrill told you that you couldn't vote, but you know, there's a new law. You may actually have your voting rights. Come to our restoration clinic." And so, the first restoration clinic they set up was in Selma, at the church, and they had a team of lawyers there, going through the records, going, nope, not moral turpitude, not moral turpitude, not moral turpitude. Then they had a team of volunteers there going through -- okay, so this is what you need to register to vote. You got to have this. You got to have that. You know, so, like, Alabama shut down the Department of Motor Vehicles in the black belt counties. Right? So how you supposed to get this -- and so, they were working this all through. You had civil society there, figuring out how to get people -- what documentation you needed, and how to get people to the nearest DMV so that they could get their driver's license. If they didn't need their driver's license -- let me back up. They didn't always need their driver's license, because they had negotiated with the State of Alabama that your mug shot could qualify as your government-issued photo ID. [Laughter] Yeah. I'm telling you, civil society wasn't playing, right [laughter]? And -- and they had registered thousands of people to vote. They also went into the jails, because Alabama had a law that said you could vote while you're in jail. It would be an absentee ballot, as long as you didn't violate the moral turpitude clause. So -- and so, folks went into the jails going, nope, not moral turpitude, not moral turpitude. Let me get you registered to vote. They registered thousands of people, and they had a caravan. Because there was some folks who weren't going to step foot in the church, so this caravan started going to poor neighbors, also with the publicity leading, saying we're going to be here on XYZ date. We're going to be here. We're going to be here. And that was that outreach. NAACP got a list of voters who didn't vote in 2016, as well as those who voted sporadically, and started calling, had their branches calling.
>> And this is, again, all about the Roy Moore/Doug Jones election, so you -- the time --
>> Carol Anderson: Yeah, yeah -- calling, because this is important, calling. And then, following up by going where folks are, meeting them in the local café, meeting them -- going to their homes, meeting them in the church, talking about -- let's get you registered to vote, or let's get you voting. What do you need? Also understanding that voting is a social action, and so, going to folks' class reunions, with packets of information about absentee ballots, last registration date, deadlines for registration, deadlines for when you got to do this, when you have to have this. Where's your polling place? Because John Merrill had shut down 66 polling places -- you know where. And what we know from the literature is that, for every tenth of a mile that you move the polling place from the black neighborhood, black voter turnout goes down by .5%. So for every tenth of a mile -- and that deals with the issue of transportation and accessibility. So where's your polling place? So you don't have folks running around all over the place, because people don't have that kind of time. And then, they set up a "get out the vote" piece where they set up, like, a private car system, like the Montgomery Bus Boycott did. So they would find out who needed a ride to the polls, and get them there. By the time it was -- I mean, this was just --
>> No, it's just -- I mean, she tells the story -- you really -- I mean, to me, it's a first draft of history, precisely because this just happened within the last 18 months. But everything is there. All the elements that we know to have been proven strategies in the Civil Rights era, and then new ones, because you've got Facebook ad impressions, 1.4 million. You've got, you know, kind of big-money philanthropy paying -- playing a big role, because one of the key differences in this effort is -- unlike the Civil Rights era, is that a lot of the local community are not only directly involved in these voter registration and get out the vote efforts, but also, they're being paid.
>> Carol Anderson: Yes.
>> Which is a key difference, as you write about, in their effectiveness, as opposed to relying on volunteers to do that kind of work.
>> Carol Anderson: Yes, right. And so, there's this -- I love that moment. Let me just read this section.
>> Sure, sure, sure, yeah, yeah.
>> Carol Anderson: Because I love this moment, because it really shows the power of the resistance. "As the votes continued to be counted, the election seemed to mirror the classic Muhammad Ali rope-a-dope, with black voters apparently overwhelmed, outmatched, and headed for sure defeat at the hands of a much-more-powerful opponent. But then, a blazing uppercut caught Roy Moore squarely on the jaw [laughter], and sent his hopes snapping back, as black people in Alabama punched above their weight and delivered an unexpected and well-delivered stunning blow." And then I do -- yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then I've got -- "and so fittingly, the first indication that Moore was in serious trouble came from a legendary place. 'Selma, Lord, Selma,' exclaimed Bernice King, daughter of Martin Luther King, Jr. 'It's no coincidence,' she tweeted, 'that Selma, where blood was shed, and the struggle for voting rights for black people pushed Doug Jones ahead for good.'" Yeah. Yeah.
[ Applause ]
I think that there is a changing dynamic that is happening in the Democratic Party, and it's slow, but it is happening. They're recognizing, one, that black women -- because black women vote.
[ Cheers and Applause ]
And they're recognizing as well that they can't take that vote for granted, and so, what we're beginning to see -- think about it. I'm in Georgia. Yes, I got Brian Kemp, but I got Stacey Abrams.
[ Cheers and Applause ]
And you see Andrew Gillam down in Florida, you know. And so, they're getting there, and it is the push that comes -- it's what always happens with change. It is the push that is coming from the grassroots, and what we must do -- A, we must vote. B, we must stay engaged. The thing is, is that it's not enough to vote, and then go back, and just act like this thing is going to run on its own. We have to hold them accountable. When we hold them accountable, we will see the kind of change -- we will see the kind of nation that we deserve.
>> So we have a lot of people online, and if you could keep your questions short and concise, because we want to get through all of them.
>> Yeah, can you speak about the liberalization of the immigration law in '65, and how that kind of broadened the populations of people being suppressed, and also the, you know, new Hispanic population of the south, and Asians in Texas, how that changed?
>> Carol Anderson: So in 1924, based on eugenics, which basically said that there was a chosen set of people, and everybody else needed to be weeded out, the U.S. passed the 1924 National Origins Act. And what that did was, it basically closed off this kind of open immigration that had led to Italians coming in, and Hungarians coming in, and Poles coming in, and it basically said, "There are only certain people we really want." And so, there was a big cap. So everything was capped. There was a big cap for the Anglo-Saxons and Britain. We want British people here. Italians -- and completely X'd out -- there will be no Asian immigration. That law of restrictive immigration was basically in place -- there was a little bit that opened up during the Second World War, because it was like, how can China be your ally? You're not allowing Chinese -- the Chinese to be able to immigrate here. I mean, come on, man. And so, they said, "Okay, we'll let 100 in." Now, you know China is kind of big, so we're going to let 100 -- I mean, it was just -- and -- but it was in 1965 as also part of -- again, part of the Civil Rights Movement, part of thinking about what is America that you see the 1965 Immigration Act that opened it up. And this is when you begin to see immigration coming in from Africa, from Asia. I mean, this is where you begin to see an incredible growing diversity, and this is where you'll also begin to see incredible white backlash from the right wing that -- you know, so you get a Samuel Huntington talking about a clash of civilizations, where you have this threat to America.
>> And this was -- to make a -- maybe a more pointed point. Much of the post-'65 immigration, one, was a testament to the Civil Rights Movement and social movements of the time, so that's an extension of the effort that blacks have made to expand democracy. Two, that much of the requirements of that immigration were predicated on U.S. corporate needs, and particular visa requirements that created, you know, higher educational requirements, which is why African immigrants are the most educated immigrants in the country. Because the standard for their entry in the country are amongst the highest for world immigrant populations, and this effort -- of course, as long as the system is using people -- has worked. But in a context where the demographics of a nation that are -- is soon to be majority black or brown, that politics has created this backlash where of course, you know, nothing makes sense in the world of Trump, in terms of, you know, logic. But what does make sense is the racist white nationalist movement that he's supporting, and so that's the backlash.
>> Do you think we need to increase the visibility of the need to vote at Dunkin Donuts, Starbucks, public libraries? That made me think -- so do you think we should -- we do have early voting in New York. We don't have early voting in New York.
>> Carol Anderson: You don't have early voting?
>> No, no, no, we don't.
>> No.
>> So --
>> Just comment on how New York -- because the current occupant of the White House comes from New York.
>> Carol Anderson: And -- you know, and so one of the things -- so several things. One is what voter suppression is designed to do is to demoralize the electorate, to make people believe that it doesn't matter, that the system is rigged. It doesn't matter what you do. Your vote doesn't count. That is a false narrative, because the last thing they want is people voting. Brian Kemp, who is Georgia's Secretary of State and running for governor -- he was recently caught on tape saying, "You know, I'm really concerned about Stacey Abrams' voter registration piece, because she's registered a lot of folk. And if all of those people that she registered actually vote, that's a problem." Now, imagine you're Secretary of State, believing if all these people vote in a democracy, that that's a problem. But that is really the problem, right? And so, yes, the vote counts. There are things that can be done. Again, it's getting -- what they did in Alabama was talking to folks about -- this is what is at stake in this election, and under -- and helping people -- and listening first to what people were saying, why they hadn't voted. What is important to them? And then being able to come back, and I think that that is part of what it is, is you figure out where you are, and what the media are that work best in your area, and then do it. And I've got to say one thing, too, is that I see a kind of -- in the blue states, right, a kind of swag, like, yeah, you know, but we're not Georgia. Yeah, we're not Alabama. The way New York is set up with multiple primaries -- it is designed to create confusion, so you don't quite know when to vote, what your district is, and so you only got a handful of folk voting, right? When we saw the purges that were happening in that last primary election, right? So there's work to be done wherever we are, and know that. Yeah.
>> And I wanted to know, what do you think the efficiency is of a black-out, meaning when we get people registered to vote, and we make demands of our politicians, especially considering the last presidential vote, when there's this talk of the lesser of two evils. And we get people registered, but we hold our vote, and we speak about how these are the things we want -- for instance, end of the war on drugs, reallocation of that -- of those funds towards other things. Do you think it's efficient to get people registered to vote and hold that vote, hold that ballot until we have specific demands of our politicians? Do you think that would be efficient at all?
>> Carol Anderson: Uh-unh. Uh-unh. And I'm going to say why. Because when we hold it, unless they do it right then, during the -- is that it gives too much of a leeway for craziness to happen. And what I mean by that -- voter suppression with -- so when I was here on this stage back in November before the election, and there was a young man who was standing right where you are. And he said, well, you know, I'm not voting, because Hillary and Trump, they are just the same. They are not the same, and so, part of what we saw was that there was a group that just felt it doesn't matter. They're just the same. It's a corrupt system, boom. And then, we had massive voter suppression with that. The black voter turnout rate was down 7%, by seven percentage points from the 2012 election to the 2016 election. In Milwaukee alone -- okay, so Wisconsin alone -- and Wisconsin -- you know, Milwaukee's dealing with meth, and they've also got Scott Walker. There was a 60,000 vote drop in Wisconsin alone from 2012 to 2016, 60,000 fewer votes. Sixty-eight percent of that drop happened out of Milwaukee alone, where 70% of the state's black population lives. So you hit Milwaukee, you have pretty much done the damage. So when we withhold -- the thing is, is that you engage the campaign going on, and you engage it, but you don't do -- and then, you have folks in that inner circle. You have folks who are writing. You have folks who are calling. You have legislative aides that you're talking to. You're doing the work before the election, during the election, and after the election, but threatening to withhold means that we end up with the worst of two evils.
>> And can I add just a simple point on this? Of course, we keep hearing this, but it's worth repeating in this moment. The presidential election may be, in some ways, the brass ticket for consequential votes, but it's the local elections that matter. And so, the context, for example, of black folks not holding their votes, but actually voting for local prosecutors is the front line of criminal justice reform in this country.
>> Carol Anderson: Yes, yes.
>> So voter registration is one thing, but if you're going to practice -- I mean, these are philosophical choices. People are going to make their own decision, but my advice to you, to be folks who are having that conversation, is minimally vote in every single local election, where you are most proximate to power, and most proximate to the decision-making that will actually affect your daily lives.
>> Carol Anderson: Yes, yes.
>> Thank you.
>> Carol Anderson: Yes.
[ Applause ]
>> Good evening, and thank you for this very timely discussion. I've been keeping an eye on the races in Georgia, as well as Florida, where my oldest brother resides, but I would like to get your thoughts on the Crystal Mason case, if you've been following that at all. Because to me, that's the most extreme form of voter suppression, and what really broke my heart was -- I believe it was "The Houston Chronicle." They interviewed her kids, and her oldest child said he was afraid to register to vote when he turned 18, because he didn't want to end up in jail. Thank you.
>> Carol Anderson: Thank you. Okay, the Crystal Mason case deals with felony disenfranchisement in Texas. Texas is -- we've got several -- several bad villains in this voter suppression story, and Texas is one of them. And Crystal Mason was a woman who had served her time for fraud, I believe, and was out on parole. And she didn't know that she couldn't vote, but she was happy to -- she had served her time, and she was ready to vote. This was a key election. She voted. They came after her with everything they had, and threw her in prison. Five years for voting. Now, think again back to the Jeff Sessions-Albert Turner case, and there was one before that that dealt with Maggie Bozeman and Julia Wilder, and -- who were also in Alabama. And this is when Alabama is using the power of the criminal justice system to, in fact, terrorize black people, and they got -- one of the -- Julia Wilder got five years, and Maggie -- and she was 69. And Maggie Bozeman got four years in an Alabama prison for registering black folk to vote. So this is a continuation of using the criminal justice system to intimidate. Now, to put this into context, you had -- also in Texas, I believe, a white politician who forged signatures, and he got probation.
>> Dr. Anderson, you were about to go into the -- answer the question that I'm about to ask, but I'm going to ask it, and ask for a little bit more detail. I'm not certain, but I think that Brooklyn, New York was one of the boroughs that was under scrutiny in terms of voting irregularities, and was included in the Voting Rights Act. What I wanted to know was -- you rightfully spoke a lot about the southern states, and, you know, their strategies for disenfranchisement, but could you talk a little bit more about some of the northern -- the history of some of the northern states, Midwestern states participating in similar kinds of efforts? If maybe not as successful, but still, engaging in behaviors that would discourage people, particularly black people, from voting.
>> Carol Anderson: In Ohio, for instance, Jon Husted, who is the secretary of state, has purged over two million voters off of the rolls since, like, 2010. The bulk of those have come out of the urban areas. In one of his major purges, 25% came out of Cuyahoga County, which is Cleveland. His aide had made it clear that the kinds of rules that they're using to purge folks, and the kinds of rules that they're using to throw out, for instance, absentee ballots, they don't use -- they don't apply those in the white rural areas. They really only apply those in the urban areas. And so, you can imagine, then, what that kind of disenfranchisement does. And the Supreme Court ruled -- because 1.2 million of those in Ohio that he'd knocked off were simply for not voting. Now, what we know -- and the law says you're not supposed to do that, and what we know is -- and that's the Motor Voter Law, the National Voter Registration Act. What we know, though, is that poor people, minorities, and young people vote sporadically, and so that is a way that you can get at that group, by saying, "Oh, you're not voting. Boom --" and knock them off. We're seeing -- in Michigan -- in Michigan, in the 2016 election, they didn't have working machines in many precincts in Detroit. What we're seeing in Pennsylvania is that they had so gerrymandered the state that basically Pittsburgh and Philadelphia didn't count. So you ended up with three Democratic congressional representatives, and for Pittsburgh -- total of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and maybe Harrisburg, and then 10 Republicans. And so, it was a way to dilute the power of black representation there. So we're seeing this. I mean, what is driving this spread is that Obama coalition. We have to know that that 2008 election -- whoo, Republicans lost their minds, and what they did was -- you begin to see a voter suppression techniques that go after African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanics, the young, and the poor. Because those were the millions that that grassroots ground game brought in, and those are the folks that the Republicans, whose policies have moved so far right. Because they injected that toxin of pure, uncut white supremacy into their party with the southern strategy, when they brought the southern Democrats in, is that their policies now can no longer resonate fully with a diverse America. And so, they've got to figure out -- how do we win? We win by suppressing African-Americans, Asians. And so, you're seeing it in Wisconsin. You're seeing it in Kansas. You're seeing it in Missouri. Where you see Republican regimes, where the governor and a Republican legislature -- that's where you're seeing massive voter suppression.
>> Last question.
>> Okay. Good afternoon, Dr. Anderson.
>> Carol Anderson: Hi.
>> Good evening. One of my concerns is -- I'm here with a group of my young people.
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We're from the Bronx, and one of my biggest concerns is, with all this rhetoric in the current climate against the global majority in this nation, if you will, how do we continue to encourage our young people to engage? Because you have young people that are 16, 17, right on the crest of being able to vote, who are self-disenfranchising as we've heard tonight. And I think we need to turn the page, if not all the way, to look at that generation, and encourage them to move in the civic space that has been afforded to them through those who have laid down their life for them to have that opportunity. And I don't think we engage them enough for them to understand what's at stake, as opposed to just being frustrated at what they hear, and what they see going on on the news. And it tells them the message that their vote don't count.
>> Carol Anderson: And again --
>> How do we engage that?
>> Carol Anderson: -- yes, and so, as I said, voter suppression is designed to do that, particularly in those targeted groups, right? There were things that -- for instance, take California. Let me back up. What Oregon did -- and this is a long way to get there, but what Oregon did was -- Oregon has one of the highest voter turnout rates in the nation. And Oregon wasn't satisfied, and so Oregon said, "We've got to have automatic voter registration." Right? None of this "you got to register by such-and-such a time" -- automatic voter registration. And so, if you don't want to vote, then you have to make the effort to opt out, and so, their voter turnout rate went up by four percentage points.
>> From 64 to 68%, which is already crazy.
>> Carol Anderson: Yeah. Right. Right? And, the diversity of their electorate also increased significantly. California, you know, that has a 42% voter turnout rate -- looked at that, and said, "Okay, we got to -- that's some of what we want, but we're going to do one better." California said, "Automatic voter registration, and we're going to preregister 16 and 17-year-olds, so that when they turn 18, they're automatically registered to vote."
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And so, you begin to get the sense of civic engagement then, and that's what's so important. So one of the first things that North Carolina did when its regime came to power was to eliminate that pre-registration for high school students at 17 with a civics lesson that went with it, because the last thing they wanted were to have these young folk fully engaged. And so, my thing is, when I know you trying to take something away from me, oh, I'm going to fight you. And that's where we have to be. We have to understand -- they wouldn't be trying to take away our right to vote if it wasn't important.
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>> That was Carol Anderson, speaking with Khalil Gibran Muhammad about her new book, "One Person, No Vote, How Voter Suppression is Destroying Democracy." If you're a New York Public Library cardholder, you can get "One Person, No Vote" from one of our branches, or you can download it on our app, Simply E. "Library Talks" is produced by Schuyler Swenson, with editorial support from Richert Schnorr, and myself, and our theme music was composed by Alison Layton-Brown.
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