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Tuesday October 14, 2014 · 1:00 PM PDT

2014/10/14 · 13:00

The battle against poll taxes and voter repression.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez

Though many people think of Jim Crow as something in our past, along with poll taxes put in place to be a "skin-color" tax to prevent people of a darker hue from voting, it isn't history. It's alive and well and being perpetrated across the U.S. and not just in the south.

State of Louisiana, Parish of Jefferson - Form printed by government of Jefferson Parish, Louisiana in 1910s, filled out 1917

I was a senior in High School the year that the 24th amendment to the U.S. Constitution was finally ratified. Here we are, 50 years later and the struggle continues.

The 24th Amendment:

The Twenty-fourth Amendment (Amendment XXIV) of the United States Constitution prohibits both Congress and the states from conditioning the right to vote in federal elections on payment of a poll tax or other types of tax. The amendment was proposed by Congress to the states on August 27, 1962, and was ratified by the states on January 23, 1964.
Poll taxes appeared in southern states after Reconstruction as a measure to prevent African Americans from voting, and had been held to be constitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States in the 1937 decision Breedlove v. Suttles. At the time of this amendment's passage, five states still retained a poll tax: Virginia, Alabama, Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi. The amendment made the poll tax unconstitutional in regard to federal elections. However, it was not until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections (1966) that poll taxes for state elections were unconstitutional because they violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

A cartoon titled, "Here's another one for you" making fun of the poll tax

Poll tax: Pay in cash or in time?

A few years ago, Rachel Maddow made the argument that standing in long lines was a form of poll tax:

Attorney General Eric Holder took a lot of static from the right-wing when he used the "poll tax" words to describe Texas' voter ID laws, while addressing the NAACP convention in Houston TX, in 2012.

"Under the proposed law, concealed handgun licenses would be acceptable forms of photo ID, but student IDs would not. Many of those without IDs would have to travel great distances to get them, and some would struggle to pay for the documents they might need to obtain them...We call those poll taxes."

The audience agreed.

Vindication came for Holder, and for us—in the ruling just handed down in Texas:

A Texas-born and raised Latina federal judge, Nelva Gonzalez Ramos, did not just block a Republican-sponsored state voter ID law, she equated it to laws enacted by states after slavery was abolished to ensure blacks could not vote.
"The Court holds that SB 14 creates an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote, has an impermissible discriminatory effect against Hispanics and African-Americans, and was imposed with an unconstitutional discriminatory purpose," Gonzalez Ramos stated in her lengthy ruling issued Thursday. "The Court further holds that SB 14 constitutes an unconstitutional poll tax."

After slaves were freed and black Americans began to win elected office, laws requiring black Americans to pay a fee to vote or to pass literacy tests began to be enacted. Similar tactics were used in the Southwest against Mexican Americans.

Texas' strict voter ID law, passed by the Republican-led Legislature in 2011, only accepts certain forms of photo ID and does not allow other commonly used ones. It does not allow college student photo IDs, for example, but allows gun permits as identification.

As I said, this isn't just about the south, which was made clear in a case dealing with Wisconsin. U.S. Circuit Judge Richard A. Posner mentioned "poll taxes" in his dissent.

A conservative judge's devastating take on why voter ID laws are evil

Then there's the argument that getting a photo ID is easy and cheap, and therefore that people without them must not care enough about voting to bother. The three-judge panel wrote that obtaining a photo ID merely requires people "to scrounge up a birth certificate and stand in line at the office that issues driver's licenses." Posner replies that he himself "has never seen his birth certificate and does not know how he would go about 'scrounging' it up." Posner appends a sheaf of documents handed to an applicant seeking a photo ID for whom no birth certificate could be found in state records. It ran to 12 pages.
As for its supposedly negligible cost, "that's an easy assumption for federal judges to make, since we are given photo IDs by court security free of charge. And we have upper-middle-class salaries. Not everyone is so fortunate." He cites a study placing the expense of obtaining documentation at $75 to $175 -- which even when adjusted for inflation is far higher than "the $1.50 poll tax outlawed by the 24th amendment in 1964."

Our right to vote is still under attack. The battle to preserve it can't just be in the courthouses. Each one of us has to vote and get others to do the same.

GOTV!

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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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This is true even after adjusting for crime rates. Slate: Black Teens Vastly More Likely to Be Killed by Police Than Whites.
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A new study by Pro Publica of FBI data on police-involved deaths found that black males between the ages 15 and 19 are 21 times more likely to be killed by police than their white counterparts.

The 1,217 deadly police shootings from 2010 to 2012 captured in the federal data show that blacks, age 15 to 19, were killed at a rate of 31.17 per million, while just 1.47 per million white males in that age range died at the hands of police.

Could higher rates of crime commission by black teens relative to their white peers explain that difference? Or, put differently, are black teenagers simply that much more likely than white teenagers to be involved in situations in which police violence is justified?

The data suggest that the answer is no. This post by activist Tim Wise points to Department of Justice statistics that break down violent crimes by the race of the perpetrator. Combining these DoJ numbers—from 2008, the most recent year for which data appears to be available—with population info, it looks like black Americans are between two and three times as likely to commit a violent crime as white Americans. But even assuming that black male teenagers are three times as likely as white teenagers to legitimately threaten the life of a police officer doesn't explain why they're twenty times more likely to be killed by police.

AP Photo/St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Huy Mach

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Cities with black mayors appear to hire black officers in a way that other cities do not. Blacks are often underrepresented in city halls and police departments. That underrepresentation often leads to underrepresentation on the force. FiveThirtyEight.com Electing A Black Mayor Leads To More Black Police Officers.
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The fatal shooting of Michael Brown in August in Ferguson, Missouri — and the protests that followed — have brought renewed attention to a range of issues, including the underrepresentation of blacks on local police forces and in the leadership of many U.S. cities and towns. Ferguson, for example, is 67 percent black and has a police force of more than 50 officers, yet you can count its black police officers on one hand. Its mayor is white, as are five of its six City Council members.

That’s no coincidence. Across U.S. cities, there is a causal relationship between those two issues: Elect black officials, and the share of black police officers rises.

We would expect cities with larger black populations to be more likely to elect black mayors and more likely to have black police officers. So, how do we know that black mayors influence the composition of the police force? For one thing, there are examples where the relationship is quite clear. In 1991, for instance, Dwight Tillery won a close election to become mayor of Cincinnati. A proponent of bringing Cincinnati into compliance with a decade-old lawsuit, he oversaw the rapid hiring of black police officers. Three years after his election, the share of the police force that was black had grown by 18 percentage points.

Beyond the anecdotal evidence, there is credible quantitative evidence that electing black mayors increases the share of the police force that is black. In a 2012 article (ungated) in American Politics Research, Princeton University’s Katherine McCabe and I examined 149 general elections for mayor in which a black candidate ran against a non-black candidate, as Tillery did. These elections took place in 74 different large and midsize cities between 1989 and 2006.

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Sometimes you have to admit your limitations in order to win. New York Times: Officials Admit a ‘Defeat’ by Ebola in Sierra Leone.
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Acknowledging a major “defeat” in the fight against Ebola, international health officials battling the epidemic in Sierra Leone approved plans on Friday to help families tend to patients at home, recognizing that they are overwhelmed and have little chance of getting enough treatment beds in place quickly to meet the surging need.

The decision signifies a significant shift in the struggle against the rampaging disease. Officials said they would begin distributing painkillers, rehydrating solution and gloves to hundreds of Ebola-afflicted households in Sierra Leone, contending that the aid arriving here was not fast or extensive enough to keep up with an outbreak that doubles in size every month or so.

“It’s basically admitting defeat,” said Dr. Peter H. Kilmarx, the leader of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s team in Sierra Leone, adding that it was “now national policy that we should take care of these people at home.”
Continue reading the main story

“For the clinicians it’s admitting failure, but we are responding to the need,” Dr. Kilmarx said. “There are hundreds of people with Ebola that we are not able to bring into a facility.”

The effort to prop up a family’s attempts to care for ailing relatives at home does not mean that officials have abandoned plans to increase the number of beds in hospitals and clinics. But before the beds can be added and doctors can be trained, experts warn, the epidemic will continue to grow.

In this photo taken on Monday, Aug. 4, 2014, a public information board explains the symptoms of the deadly Ebola virus in the city of Freetown, Sierra Leone.

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Pioneering black businessman who helped define the look of the 80's. The Grio: Jheri Curl pioneer, Comer Cottrell dead at 82.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~mer Cottrell, creator of the Curly Kit, an in-home hair treatment that allowed users to get the Jheri Curl hairstyle popularized by Michael Jackson at a reasonable price, died on October 10 at the age of 82.

The black hair care company that Cottrell started in 1972, Pro Line Corp., grew from an initial investment of $600 to more than $10 million in annual sales. With the release of its signature Curly Kit in 1979, the company “democratized the Jheri curl,” according to Lori L. Tharps, co-author of Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America. Cottrell’s Curly Kit allowed African-Americans to fashion their own hair in the popular style for just $8; salon prices at the time of its release often cost upwards of $200.

Michael Jackson Billie Jean album cover TheGrio.com
Michael Jackson Billie Jean album cover (Epic Records/Sony Music Entertainment)

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On his revolutionary hair product, Cottrell was modest, telling the Dallas Observer in 1996, “We looked at the curl process, and saw it really was a simple process and people could do it themselves. It was no secret.” Cottrell eventually sold Pro Line Corp. for $80 million to Alberto Culver in 2000, according to the Daily Mail.

In addition to being an entrepreneur, Cottrell was also a philanthropist and activist. During the 1970s, before the explosive success of his Curly Kit, Cottrell was leader of the Los Angeles Black Businessman’s Association, which assisted local African-American businesses in receiving federal contracts. He purchased Bishop College for $3 million, renovated its campus, and helped move historically black Paul Quinn College to 144 acre grounds located just south of Dallas.

Michael Jackson Billie Jean album cover (Epic Records/Sony Music Entertainment)

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Voices and Soul

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Contributor

The Landscape that Thylias Moss observed from the upstairs window of her childhood homes; and later, painfully felt in school, was of a particular kind of Suffering. An "exceptional" kind of Suffering, found peculiarly within the borders of an expanding American exaltation. She interiorized and walked about on that Landscape; feeling the sting of an icy winter blowing across the crowded hilly streets and the lonely flat plains of this Suffering Life.

Yet as harsh as that Landscape and its populace proved, it did not defeat her or bend her to the false idol of capitulation. Instead, she contemplated a forgotten Divinity manifested in that Landscape of extinction.

The Rapture Of Dry Ice Burning Off Skin As The Moment Of The Soul's Apotheosis
How will we get used to joy
if we won't hold onto it?

Not even extinction stops me; when
I've sufficient craving, I follow the buffalo,
their hair hanging below their stomachs like
fringes on Tiffany lampshades; they can be turned on
so can I by a stampede, footsteps whose sound
is my heart souped up, doctored, ninety pounds
running off a semi's invincible engine. Buffalo
heaven is Niagara Falls. There their spirit
gushes. There they still stampede and power
the generators that operate the Tiffany lamps
that let us see in some of the dark. Snow
inundates the city bearing their name; buffalo
spirit chips later melt to feed the underground,
the politically dredlocked tendrils of roots. And this
has no place in reality, is trivial juxtaposed with

the faces of addicts, their eyes practically as sunken
as extinction, gray ripples like hurdlers' track lanes
under them, pupils like just more needle sites.
And their arms: flesh trying for a moon apprenticeship,
a celestial antibody. Every time I use it
the umbrella is turned inside out,
metal veins, totally hardened arteries and survival
without anything flowing within, nothing saying
life came from the sea, from anywhere but coincidence
or God's ulcer, revealed. Yet also, inside out
the umbrella tries to be a bouquet, or at least
the rugged wrapping for one that must endure much,
without dispensing coherent parcels of scent,
before the refuge of vase in a room already accustomed
to withering mind and retreating skin. But the smell
of the flowers lifts the corners of the mouth as if
the man at the center of this remorse has lifted her
in a waltz. This is as true as sickness. The Jehovah's

Witness will come to my door any minute with tracts, an
inflexible agenda and I won't let him in because
I'm painting a rosy picture with only blue and
yellow (sadness and cowardice).
I'm something of an alchemist. Extinct.
He would tell me time is running out.
I would correct him: time ran out; that's why
history repeats itself, why we can't advance.
What joy will come has to be here right now: Cheer
to wash the dirt away, Twenty Mule Team Borax and
Arm & Hammer to magnify Cheer's power, lemon-scented
bleach and ammonia to trick the nose, improved--changed--
Tide, almost all-purpose starch that cures any limpness
except impotence. Celebrate that there's Mastercard
to rule us, bring us to our knees, the protocol we follow
in the presence of the head of our state of ruin, the
official with us all the time, not inaccessible in
palaces or White Houses or Kremlins. Besides every
ritual is stylized, has patterns and repetitions
suitable for adaptation to dance. Here come toe shoes,
brushstrokes, oxymorons. Joy

is at our tongue tips: let the great thirsts and hungers
of the world be the marvelous thirsts, glorious hungers.
Let hearbreak be alternative to coffeebreak, five
midmorning minutes devoted to emotion.

-- Thylias Moss