Author: Emily Puisseaux Moreno
One day the British colonies were fed up with the taxation with no representation and they realized that this situation had to end. Then, Patrick Henry delivered his famous speech: Give me liberty or give death. We can perceive the strong meaning that must convey the speech by only reading the tittle. All the next generations were educated on the value of supporting this idea. But almost a century later, when the negroes claimed their voting rights and called for equality according to this statement, the government gave them nothing but police brutality. The blacks are citizens when the US army needs soldiers, but when they demand their rights they are nothing but shadows. Negroes picked up all the US cotton, fought all the US wars but they receive nothing but a cruel treatment. Cleary, all the American books blow over that.
“When this country here was first being founded there were 13 colonies. The whites were colonized. They were fed up with this taxation without representation, so some of them stood up and said “liberty or death.” Though I went to a white school over here in Mason, Michigan, the white man made the mistake of letting me read his history books. He made the mistake of teaching me that Patrick Henry was a patriot, and George Washington, wasn’t nothing non-violent about old Pat or George Washington. Liberty or death was what brought about the freedom of whites in this country from the English. They didn’t care about the odds. Why they faced the wrath of the entire British Empire. And in those days they used to say that the British Empire was so vast and so powerful when the sun – the sun would never set on them. This is how big it was, yet these 13 little, scrawny states, tired of taxation without representation, tired of being exploited and oppressed and degraded, told that big British Empire “liberty or death”. And here you have 22 million Afro-American black people today catching more hell than Patrick Henry ever saw. And I’m here to tell you in case you don’t know it that you got a new generation of black people in this country who don’t care anything whatsoever about odds. They don’t want to hear you old Uncle Tom handkerchief heads talking about the odds. No. This is a new generation. If they’re gonna draft these young black men and send them over to Korea or South Vietnam to face 800 million Chinese – if you’re not afraid of those odds, you shouldn’t be afraid of these odds” (Malcolm X, 1964).
What happened in the US[1] was not by chance but the results of structural schemes of oppression that have lasted for decades and decades and a social debt that has become unpayable. Before 1863, Afro Americans couldn´t take a ballot on account of their condition as slaves. The moment the Emancipation Proclamation was signed by Abraham Lincoln, these slaves became American citizens so they were regarded just as much citizens as the native Americans and were equal under the law, or at least it was supposed to be that way. Something that must not be forgotten is that at the end of the day, they didn´t come of their own free will, they were snatched and brought to our continent: they were forced to be Americans and we can´t disregard it or simply put a brave face on it.
The US government has always violated their voting rights by promoting policies that put limits on their full involvement in that process. For instance, after the Civil War, almost all southern states enacted laws in order to maintain political white dominance. Although, freedmen had been emancipated, their lives were restricted by the well-known Black Codes. They were even prohibited from bearing arms, voting, gathering in groups and learning to read and write, which were unbreakable rights in light of the Bill of Rights. Congress responded by instituting Reconstruction Governments due to the states ‘reluctance to grant these rights to African Americans. In spite of the “good intent” of the Congress, these sorts of governments didn´t make the difference.
Some amendments were approved and added to the American Constitution so as to try to grapple black men´s situation. Among them, 13th, 14th and 15th amendments can be quoted. The first one outlawed the slavery, the second one granted full US citizenship to all former slaves and the third one set out that the right of the US citizens to vote shall not be denied on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude. But the former Confederate States encountered other ways to ban blacks from exercising their rights by establishing registration barriers such as literacy tests, grandfather clauses, residency requirements or poll taxes.
Afterwards, the Jim Crow laws came with their slogan: separated but equal. They were state laws that enforced racial segregation in all public facilities in the South. The US military was even segregated. These laws were overruled by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (prohibits racial discrimination in voting), no doubt, the major achievement of the Civil Rights Movement in the US. To sum up, negroes couldn´t vote during the first half of the 20th century. The reasons ranged from electoral fraud and voting restrictions to violent events promoted by racist movements like the Ku Klux Klan, whose main goal was to frighten the blacks by using any kind of method including public lynchings because of the fact that they couldn’t stand the fact that the negroes had been given the US citizenship.
These movements needed to point their fingers at somebody and African American were easy targets. In some way or another, the government always made up strategies to go on with slavery by another name. When Nixon took office, another period of restrictions that featured new types of exclusion started: the massive incarceration was chosen this time.
According to the 14th amendment (it was previously mentioned), the US states are allowed to deny the voting right to any person who had been sentenced for any sort of offense and they can make the decision of giving this right back to this person when he/she is released from prison. In the wake of that, more than six million townspeople can´t vote due to prior crimes or the lack of funds for paying penalties they have been charged with. Despite of the fact that the US population stands for five percent of the world population, its incarceration rate reaches over twenty-five percent of the world rate.
Most states, apart from Maine and Vermont, prohibited people who were released on parole from voting. Kentucky, Virginia and Iowa even deny this right to people that have been released from prison. The US people need to realize that this transgression not only has an effect on the negroes´ rights, but also can bear on the freedom of a whole nation. Maybe, George Bush or later, Donald Trump, hadn´t won the elections if all the convicts that were banned from voting would have done so.
Florida is on the top of the states that imposed the most several restrictions in voting. This state can be even analyzed in detail because of the role it plays in the US elections. Clearly, the American Electoral System has found lots of ways of putting African Americans out of the electoral process. The racial inequalities that feature the US Penal System don´t enable million blacks to vote: African American convicts represent a thirty-four percent of the American inmates when they only stand for over a twelve percent of the entire population.
What is a chief advantage for both Democratic and Republican parties[2], is truly an act against the American Democracy: the only democracy that keeps its voters away from the electoral colleges by shutting them down violently and playing down these kinds of events. It´s the only democracy in which voters disappear and out of the blue, votes show up.
Bibliography
Cretton, D. D. (Director). (2019). Just Mercy: A story of justice and Redemption [Motion Picture]. United States.
Jim Crow Laws: Definition, Facts and Timeline. (2018, february 28). Retrieved from http://www.history.com
King, M. L. (1963). I have a dream. Washington, US.
León, E. M. (2020, agosto 30). La boleta pendiente de Jarvious Cotton. Juventud Rebelde, p. 7.
Leyes Jim Crow. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://es.m.wikipedia.org
Stevenson, B. (2014). Just Mercy, a story of justice and redemption. New York: Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company.
X, M. (1964). The Ballot or the Bullet. Detroit, US.
[1] Police brutality and racism.
[2] In the US, there is basically one party: the business party. It has two factions called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different but carry out variations on the same policies (Chomsky, 2021).
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