During May of 1787, 239 years ago this month, the drafting of the US Constitution began.
The framers of the Constitution had the unique vision and wisdom to conceive of a new form of government based on the rule of law rather than the rule of a monarch.
Let us recognize that they also possessed the intellectual capacity to conceive of a government that included women and people of color.
They undoubtedly held within them the wisdom and imagination to envision a nation in which no person is enslaved by another.
Yet, they *chose* not to act on that imagination and *chose* not to include women, Black people, and indigenous people as free, voting citizens.
The founding fathers and framers of the constitution did not lack vision; they lacked the desire to create an actual democracy.
They created exactly what they intended – a government for wealthy, land-owning white men who enslave other humans for the purpose of building personal wealth and fueling the American economy.
Over the course of two and a half centuries, through the generational struggle of millions of people, a civil war, legislation, and the courts, we slowly expanded both freedom and voting rights.
The 13th Amendment granted freedom, the 14th recognized citizenship, and the 15th guaranteed the right to vote. Women led a sustained fight for over 70 years before winning suffrage. It wasn’t until 1964 and 1965 that the South was forced by Federal law to honor the voting rights of African Americans.
Last week, the six Republican members of the Supreme Court struck another blow against this progress. They rolled back one of the remaining landmark sections of legislation protecting the voting rights of Black and minority populations in the former Confederacy.
These were the very states that instituted Jim Crow laws to keep Black folk from voting for 88 years after the collapse of post-Civil War Reconstruction.
With the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the states most recalcitrantly opposed to equal rights were required to consider and protect the voting desires of minority populations when drawing congressional districts.
Now, 61 years later, the conservative majority of the court has decided that it is time to remove this protection.
The gerrymandering war is now going to escalate even further, and we will once again watch the former Confederacy devalue Black voters in the name of partisan politics.
- Within hours of the SCOTUS announcement, Louisiana announced that they would postpone the primary election that had already started so they can redraw Congressional districts to favor Republicans and disfavor Black votes.
- Florida redistricted earlier in the week in anticipation of the ruling.
- Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee have already indicated they intend to erase Black-leaning voting districts as soon as possible.
Voters should pick the representatives of their communities. Representatives should not get to pick which communities get to be their voters.
We are regressing as a nation as some among us fight tooth and nail to drag the country backward towards the earliest days of the Constitution.
While both parties use this undemocratic practice, Republicans unrepentantly want less people to vote and want to control who we vote for.
Gerrymandering is putting our entire Republic at risk, is wholly undemocratic, and must end.
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