President Biden believes Georgia’s new, GOP-promulgated voting restrictions are Jim Crow 2.0. Republicans say no. But Jim Crow was not Jim Crow until it was Jim Crow. The process took time after Reconstruction, explains Jamelle Bouie:
There was no statute that said, “Black people cannot vote.” Instead, Southern lawmakers spun a web of restrictions and regulations meant to catch most Blacks (as well as many whites) and keep them out of the electorate. It is true that the “yes” argument of President Biden and other Democrats overstates similarities and greatly understates key differences — chief among them the violence that undergirded the Jim Crow racial order. But the “no” argument of conservatives and Republicans asks us to ignore context and extend good faith to lawmakers who overhauled their state’s election laws because their party lost an election.
“The disenfranchisers were forced to contrive devious means to accomplish their purposes,” wrote J. Morgan Kousser in “The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910” (1974). Jim Crow 2.0 has to be just as careful to avoid clearly running afoul of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. “Black people cannot vote” won’t appear in the legislative record.
Neither was Southern resistance about race alone:
One of Kousser’s conclusions is that Jim Crow voting restrictions were as much about partisanship as they were about race, with Southern Democrats targeting the two groups outside of plantation-dominated areas, Blacks and low-income whites, who powered their Republican and Populist opposition.
That was before the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s produced a “come to Jesus” moment for Democrats, and Republicans took over the mantle of overt discrimination.
Race is too simplistic a frame for explaining Republican voting restrictions in Georgia and elsewhere. Republicans are devoted to conserving the established pecking order in this country. And raw power for themeslves.
“The incontrovertible truth is that if Trump had won Georgia, or if Republicans had held Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue’s seats in the Senate, this law wouldn’t exist,” Bouie writes:
It took three decades of struggle, and violence, before Southern elites could reclaim dominance over Southern politics. No particular restriction was decisive. The process was halting, contingent and contested, consolidating in different places at different times. It was only when the final pieces fell into place that the full picture of what took place was clear.
Put a little differently, the thing about Jim Crow is that it wasn’t “Jim Crow” until, one day, it was.
The signs are clear even if the denials are loud. Nobody is fooled except Republicans and some of their judges.