We should not forget Smith v. Allwright
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver Velez
As we stand and observe what can happen to our rights when the Supreme Court becomes a tool for right wing activism, it would be wise to remember a time when that body made decisions based on not what was the will of the 1%, nor even the prevailing views of racists in the US who were legion.
Most of us can easily cite rulings like Brown v Board of Education as key decisions in the Civil Rights struggle. But today is the anniversary of a decision that preceded it. On April 3rd, 1944 the U.S. Supreme court decided Smith v. Allwright.
"All citizens of the United States who are otherwise qualified by law to vote at any election by the people in any State, Territory, district, county, city, parish, township, school district, municipality, or other territorial subdivision, shall be entitled and allowed to vote at all such elections, without distinction of race, color, or previous condition of servitude; any constitution, law, custom, usage, or regulation of any State or Territory, or by or under its authority, to the contrary notwithstanding."
I am not a lawyer, nor legal scholar. I am however a bit of a nag about history, since I deeply believe if you don't know where you've been, you can't see where you are standing today and what actions need to be taken for the future. Where the Supreme Court is concerned, I know that I must double my own efforts to see that voters are registered, and that we work hard as hell to ensure that in the next 8 (yes I said 8-we need to think beyond the re-election of BHO) that the balance of SCOTUS is shifted to one where our rights as humans will be guaranteed. What could be more basic in the U.S. than our right to vote?
I'm old enough to remember when black folks couldn't vote in many parts of the U.S. I am also old enough to remember my grandparents refusing to become Democrats because the party still housed Dixiecrats.
My how we have changed! In my lifetime I've watched the "R" in Republican stand simply for racist.
I watch in dismay as we see their manipulations across the U.S. in state after state to find ways to disenfranchise many people, of all colors. As a feminist anti-racist I watch them pull yet another "r", for "roll-back", and I wonder how far back they really want us to go?
It's our job to stop them and keep moving forward.
So let us look at some history today, to remember how certain decisions made changes for the better, and applaud those intrepid advocates for justice who fought and won.
Above, and below you see Thurgood Marshall. Today, I want to remember Marshall who, before he became a Justice, was an attorney who argued before the Court, as council for the NAACP.
On April 3, 1944—68 years ago today—the Supreme Court in Smith v. Allwright chipped away at race-based voter discrimination, ruling that a state cannot “permit a private organization to practice racial discrimination in elections.”
The case was brought in response to a resolution by the Democratic Party of Texas (described as a “voluntary association” by the Texas Supreme Court)—a policy which allowed only whites to participate in Democratic primary elections. Lonnie Smith, a 39-year-old African American man, was denied the right to vote in the 1940 Texas Democratic primary, and thus began his four-year legal struggle.
Famed NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall—who four years earlier in Chambers v. Florida had won his first of 29 Supreme Court victories—argued that Texas’s Democratic Party’s policy violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, and as such denied African Americans their full citizenship rights.
Here's a fascinating "lost interview" with Marshall done by Mike Wallace (up to about 4:58 followed by a commercial) in which he discusses his lack of support for a party which would embrace Southern Democrats.
The NAACP Legal Defense Fund describes the court battle:
In Smith v. Allwright, Thurgood Marshall rose in front of the United States Supreme Court to argue that Texas’s Democratic primary system allowed whites to structurally dominate the politics of the one-party South. Specifically, the case presented the question of whether the Texas Democratic Party’s policy of prohibiting Blacks from voting in primary elections violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The Supreme Court held that it did, explaining that:The United States is a constitutional democracy. Its organic law grants to all citizens a right to participate in the choice of elected officials without restriction by any state because of race. This grant to the people of the opportunity for choice is not to be nullified by a state through casting its electoral process in a form which permits a private organization to practice racial discrimination in the election. In so ruling, Smith overruled a unanimous nine year old decision in Grovey v. Townsend that held that the Texas Democratic Party’s race-based restrictions on voting in primaries was constitutional because it was not state action, and thus it had not been endorsed or authorized by the state.
The implications of Smith had far-reaching effects on race relations in the South. It was the watershed in the struggle for Black rights, and it signaled the beginning of the Second Reconstruction and the modern civil rights movement. The political and social advances of Blacks simply could not have occurred without the changes that came in the wake of the overthrow of the Democratic white primary. Marshall characterized the ruling of Smith, which he considered his most important case, as “so clear and free of ambiguity” that the right of Blacks to participate in primaries was established “once and for all.” African-American voter registration vastly improved immediately following the Court’s ruling in Smith, causing Marshall to recognize the case as “a giant milestone in the progress of Negro Americans toward full citizenship.” Within just a couple of years huge changes took place. The number of Southern blacks registered to vote rose to between 700,000 and 800,000 by 1948 and then to one million by 1952.
For those of you who may be interested in an in-depth study of this case and the struggles that led up to it, I suggest you read The Battle for the Black Ballot:Smith v. Allwright and the Defeat of the Texas All-White Primary, by Charles L. Zelden
The real meaning of Smith’s challenge to the Texas all-white primary lies at the heart of the entire civil rights revolution. One of the first significant victories for the NAACP’s newly formed Legal Defense Fund against Jim Crow segregation, it provided the conceptual foundation which underlay Thurgood Marshall’s successful arguments in Brown v. Board of Education. It was also viewed by Marshall as one of his most important personal victories.
As Zelden shows, the Smith decision attacked the intractable heart of segregation, as it redrew the boundary between public and private action in constitutional law and laid the groundwork for many civil rights cases to come. It also redefined the Court’s involvement in what had been a hands-off area of “political questions” and foreshadowed its participation in voter reapportionment cases.
Just as
young Thurgood never dreamed he would one day ascend to the Supreme Court, few of us could imagine a black justice seated there.
Marshall attended Baltimore's Colored High and Training School (since renamed Frederick Douglass Senior High School), where he was an above-average student and put his finely honed skills of argument to use as a star member of the debate team. The teenaged Marshall was also something of a mischievous troublemaker. His greatest high school accomplishment, memorizing the entire United States Constitution, was actually a teacher's punishment for misbehaving in class. After graduating from high school in 1926, Marshall attended Lincoln University, a historically black college in Pennsylvania. There he joined a remarkably distinguished student body that included Kwame Nkrumah, the future president of Ghana, Langston Hughes, the great poet, and Cab Calloway, the famous jazz singer.
After graduating from Lincoln with honors in 1930, Marshall applied to the University of Maryland Law School. Despite being overqualified academically, Marshall was rejected because of his race. This firsthand experience with discrimination in education made a lasting impression on Marshall and helped determine the future course of his career. Instead of Maryland, Marshall attended law school in Washington, D.C. at Howard University, another historically black school. The dean of Howard Law at the time was the pioneering civil rights lawyer Charles Houston. Marshall quickly fell under the tutelage of Houston, a notorious disciplinarian and extraordinarily demanding professor. Marshall recalled of Houston, "He would not be satisfied until he went to a dance on the campus and found all of his students sitting around the wall reading law books instead of partying." Marshall graduated magna cum laude from Howard in 1933.
And yet, he did become the first black Justice on the Supreme Court. But simply being black, and first, is not enough to laud. He was committed deeply to civil rights. We see how the appointment of Clarence Thomas to that same court, to succeed him was a slap in our collective faces by Bush, and the 52 Senators who confirmed him.
So we have work to do.
We can remember a time when the court made decisions for the benefit of all people, and not corporations as people. We have to ensure that future Senates will not continue to backslide with more appointments like Thomas', dragging the Court further out of line with what it is supposed to uphold - justice.
We have a President to re-elect. We have a Senate and House to win, not just in 2012, and we have most of all to ensure the future of the SCOTUS.
To quote Bobby Seale, we need to "Seize the Time". The time is now, for our future and our children's futures depend upon it.
*For our hearing impaired or deaf readers here's a short bio of Marshall with text and pictures, uploaded by a student.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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An interesting contrast in Brazil this is viewed as an issue of class 1st and race 2nd, in the USA it would most likely be the other way around. New York Times: In Brazil Cyclist’s Death, A Clash Between Wealth And Life on the Fringes.
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It started out as just another Saturday night in Brazil.
Thor Batista, the 20-year-old son of Brazil’s richest man, was driving back one night in March from a meal at a steakhouse in the mountains above Rio. He was on a highway at the steering wheel of his father’s $1.3 million sports car, a Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren.
Wanderson Pereira dos Santos, 30, who lived in a shack at the highway’s edge and worked unloading trailer trucks, was on his bicycle, on an errand to buy flour. His wife was preparing to bake a cake. They were celebrating her birthday.
When Mr. Batista’s McLaren suddenly smashed into Mr. Pereira dos Santos, killing him instantly, it was clear that more than the two men collided on that stretch of highway.
Two Brazils also met head-on: one in which a small elite live with almost unfathomable wealth, and another in which millions eke out an existence on the margins of that abundance.
“There have been so many people run over that I’ve lost count,” said Caubi Lopes, 49, a manual laborer who knew Mr. Pereira dos Santos and lives near the site of the car crash, in Duque de Caxias, on Rio’s outskirts. About 100 families live there in shacks wedged into a slope near the highway.
“It’s only this case that has gotten so much attention because of that man,” said Mr. Lopes, referring to Mr. Batista’s father, Eike Batista, a mining magnate with a $30 billion fortune who used to park the McLaren in the living room of his mansion.
Marcia Foletto/Globo, via Getty Images
First picture Eike Batista, left, a mining magnate with a $30 billion fortune has defended his son, Thor Batista, right. Second picture Wanderson Pereira dos Santos.
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A total failure. The world rallied to confront Haiti’s cholera, but the mission was muddled by the United Nations’ apparent role in setting off the epidemic and its unwillingness to acknowledge it. New York Times: Global Failures on a Haitian Epidemic
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Jean Salgadeau Pelette, handsome when medicated and groomed, often roamed this central Haitian town in a disheveled state, wild-eyed and naked. He was a familiar figure here, the lanky scion of a prominent family who suffered from a mental illness.
On Oct. 16, 2010, Mr. Pelette, 38, woke at dawn in his solitary room behind a bric-a-brac shop off the town square. As was his habit, he loped down the hill to the Latem River for his bath, passing the beauty shop, the pharmacy and the funeral home where his body would soon be prepared for burial.
The river would have been busy that morning, with bathers, laundresses and schoolchildren brushing their teeth. Nobody thought of its flowing waters, downstream from a United Nations peacekeeping base, as toxic.
When Mr. Pelette was found lying by the bank a few hours later, he was so weak from a sudden, violent stomach illness that he had to be carried back to his room. It did not immediately occur to his relatives to rush him to the hospital.
“At that time, the word ‘cholera’ didn’t yet exist,” said one of his brothers, Malherbe Pelette. “We didn’t know he was in mortal danger. But by 4 that afternoon, my brother was dead. He was the first victim, or so they say.”
In the 17 months since Mr. Pelette was buried in the trash-strewn graveyard here, cholera has killed more than 7,050 Haitians and sickened more than 531,000, or 5 percent of the population. Lightning fast and virulent, it spread from here through every Haitian state, erupting into the world’s largest cholera epidemic despite a huge international mobilization still dealing with the effects of the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake.
Damon Winter/The New York Times
A child played and a woman washed clothes at the river tributary in Meille that is believed to be the source of the cholera epidemic.
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A golden opportunity for the rest of the world to show the meaning of meritocracy. Economist: Hats off to Ngozi
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When economists from the World Bank visit poor countries to dispense cash and advice, they routinely tell governments to reject cronyism and fill each important job with the best candidate available. It is good advice. The World Bank should take it. In appointing its next president, the bank’s board should reject the nominee of its most influential shareholder, America, and pick Nigeria’s Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.
The World Bank is the world’s premier development institution. Its boss needs experience in government, in economics and in finance (it is a bank, after all). He or she should have a broad record in development, too. Ms Okonjo-Iweala has all these attributes, and Colombia’s José Antonio Ocampo has a couple. By contrast Jim Yong Kim, the American public-health professor whom Barack Obama wants to impose on the bank, has at most one.
Ms Okonjo-Iweala is in her second stint as Nigeria’s finance minister. She has not broken Nigeria’s culture of corruption—an Augean task—but she has sobered up its public finances and injected a measure of transparency. She led the Paris Club negotiations to reschedule her country’s debt and earned rave reviews as managing director of the World Bank in 2007-11. Hers is the CV of a formidable public economist.
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The President faces a challenge that befalls many successful blacks. How do you talk about racism when your position in life seems to suggest that it doesn't exist? Time: Why Obama Will Never Call Out Racism.
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Barack Obama is not a black leader. He’s a leader who’s black. This is not an insignificant distinction. In order to become President, he had to promise to be President for all the people and not be someone who would be a special friend to the black community, and he has lived up to that pledge. Black America has enjoyed the spiritual boost and pride injection that’s come from seeing the brother break the highest glass ceiling and strut through the White House lawn and parade his beautiful family before the world. But when Obama turns to governing, it’s a different story.
When he spoke of Trayvon Martin, Obama did so in a humane and paternal way, though he was careful not to bias the ongoing Department of Justice investigation. But more crucially, he was careful not to racialize the situation, which has become a racialized time bomb. Obama leavened his comments by using a rhetorical device he often employs, which is to universalize the situation. He said, “I think about my own kids,” which personalized the moment but risked coming close to pointing out the racial aspect, so he immediately followed that phrase with a universalizing statement: “Every parent in America should be able to understand why it’s absolutely imperative to investigate every aspect of this.” A moment later he repeated that pattern: “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon, and all of us Americans are gonna take this with the seriousness it deserves.” This rhetorical gesture signals to black Americans that he’s not avoiding race — he references it in coded ways — but avoiding making white Americans feel guilty about racism. He gives everyone a way to feel that these issues are their purview while downplaying the pernicious impact of racism on the moment.
Obama has been extra vigilant about all this ever since he said the cop who arrested Henry Louis Gates Jr. had “acted stupidly.” Then, Obama voiced what many black Americans felt and wanted him to say while also insulting every police officer in America, which backed him into a corner, thus making the “kumbaya” beer summit a political necessity. Was it an attempt to foment peace and interracial harmony? Sure. Was it something of a disgrace because two brilliant and accomplished black men and the Vice President were sitting on an equal plane with a police officer who had abused his power and made an arrest that was, well, unintelligent? Yes. In that debacle, Obama paid dearly for stepping off the lofty perch on which he soars over American racism by never calling it out too boldly. Aides told me he resolved not to make that mistake again. Now if you ask the President about double-digit unemployment among blacks, he’ll tell you that he cares about all Americans getting jobs. Fair enough, but black Americans have particular problems stemming from racism, and sometimes we need help. I doubt black Americans realized that voting for Obama meant a spiritual leap forward but a pragmatic step back. Programs or hires that Clinton and Bush would have made and looked magnanimous Obama will avoid because they would make him look cronyist.
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When an author writes a character description of "dark brown skin and eyes with thick, dark hair." it's amazing what some people will do to deny that the character "should be" black. The Root: Racism: Realer Than Fiction.
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This time around, The Hunger Games, based on the wildly popular young-adult novel written by Suzanne Collins, is at the center of the conflict. Fans of the novel-turned-Hollywood blockbuster set Twitter on fire upon learning that black people were playing three characters -- Rue, Thresh and Cinna -- in the film.
In the novel, Rue is clearly described as having "dark brown skin and eyes" and "thick, dark hair." Thresh is described as having the same "dark skin as Rue." The characters of Rue and Thresh are portrayed by 13-year-old actress Amandla Stenberg, who is black and Jewish, and Nigerian-born actor Day Okeniyi. Cinna, the other black character in the film, was not described racially in the novel but is played by rocker-turned-actor Lenny Kravitz, who is also black and Jewish.
Racist tweets included everything from "Eww Rue is black" to the use of the "N" word to "Kk call me racist but when I found out rue was black her death wasn't as sad #ihatemyself."
At least the last commenter has the good sense to hate himself. For those who don't have the good sense to hate themselves when making stupid comments about 13-year-olds, then how about not saying anything? It's pretty scary to think that even in a supposedly creative space like filmmaking, which stuck pretty closely to the character descriptions in the novel, that the filmmaker's casting choices are being met with such racist banter. Rue was described as "dark brown" -- shouldn't they be saying that Stenberg is too light? Kravitz's character was not even described in terms of skin color in the novel, so what does it matter?
Rue courtesy of Lionsgate
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
Two quotes by Malcolm X resonated with me during my early childhood in Oregon; and resonate still.
"We didn't land on Plymouth Rock, my brothers and sisters, Plymouth Rock landed on us!"
and
"I have no mercy or compassion for a society that crushes people, and then penalizes them for not being able to stand up under the weight."
Many things have been written and speculated about the Rap Artist, Tupak Shakur. He was certainly a child and man of his times; and he died far too early. His social commentary and poetry of the human condition; particularily, the conditon of black men and women, is certainly informed by the two quotes I cited. His poetry addresses the plain facts of what it is to live under a dual system of Due Process and Equal Protection. It might be argued that the
"apartheid" Jim Crow laws were overturned in the public and private arenas; but Shakur saw how that Jim Crow mentality is alive and well in the most cherished of our
"Ideals." Because when millions of black men and women are killed or incarcerated; while well connected Stand Your Ground murderers walk free, one would think that...
Liberty Needs Glasses
Liberty Needs Glasses
excuse me but lady liberty needs glasses
and so does mrs justice by her side
both the broads r blind as bats
stumbling thru the system
justice bumped into mutulu and
trippin on geronimo pratt
but stepped right over oliver
and his crooked partner ronnie
justice stubbed her big toe on mandela
and liberty was misquoted by the indians
slavery was a learning phase
forgotten with out a verdict
while justice is on a rampage
4 endangered surviving black males
i mean really if anyone really valued life
and cared about the masses
theyd take em both 2 pen optical
and get 2 pair of glasses
-- Tupac Shakur
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Welcome to the Black Kos Community front porch. Grab a comfy seat - sit down and rap with us for a while.
Front porch music today "Seize the Time" from Black Panther Party folk singer Elaine Brown, to segue with the poem above from Panther cub Tupac.