Under the baobab: We’ve come too far to stand by and watch voter suppression efforts

On Feb. 1, 1871 Congressman Jefferson Franklin Long addressed the U.S. House of Representatives. He was the first African American member of Congress to speak from the floor of the House and only the second elected to it. Born enslaved in Georgia, he became a prominent businessman during Reconstruction. Long was arguing against pardoning unrepentant Confederates, who were trying to be readmitted to Congress. Many of them belonged to organizations like the Ku Klux Klan that were surreptitiously and openly attacking Black freedmen. He warned:

“If this House removes the disabilities of these disloyal men, I venture to prophesy you will again have trouble from the very same men who gave you trouble before.”

Long was right. The House voted 118 to 90 to grant the Confederates amnesty. They immediately began to systematically eliminated Black people from the Georgia political arena. Though the 15th Amendment forbade the states from disenfranchising Black people, Southern segregationist found a way to do it, using the poll tax, grandfather clauses, literacy tests and lynchings. For over 100 years, no other African American was elected to Congress from Georgia until Andrew Young won in 1972. Congressman Rev. Raphael Warnock became the first African American to be elected to the U. S. Senate in 2021.

For the 150 years since the Civil War, African Americans were actively and violently denied their right to vote. But there has been resistance. In 1962 Charles Sherrod and Cordell Reagon organized the Albany Movement, which protested for equal rights including the right to vote. In 1964 Fannie Lou Hamer, Bob Moses, Stokely Carmicheal organized 1,200 students to form the Freedom Democratic Party in Mississippi to petition the Democratic Party for equality, justice and the right to vote. In 1965 John Lewis and Rev. Martin Luther King led the celebrated march across the Edmund Pettus bridge in Alabama trying to obtain the right to vote. They were successful. A few months later President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act.

This year following the leadership of Black women like Stacy Abrams and Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms along with the efforts of Black voters and other freedom loving folks, Senators Warnock and Ossoff were elected. The white folks who controlled the Georgia State Legislature reacted by passing regressive laws which clearly have the intention and the effect of suppressing the African American vote.

It will not work. We have come too far to turn around now.

I believe that the people’s response to the draconian attempts of the Georgia Legislature will be to mount an even more militant resistance to voter suppression in Georgia, in Pennsylvania and wherever the ugly face of white supremacy dares to pop its head. We, Americans, are a people who have survived a pandemic, an economic depression, an attempted national coup on Congress. We have an environment to clean up, an infrastructure to rebuild, and a racist misogynistic system to dismantle. We are the issue of our founding fathers but we are also the progeny of our mothers’ tenacity, the wise women who carried, nurtured and loved us. They showed us courage to seek truth, and taught us to work in community.

“These disloyal men” still mired in their disabilities of their prejudice are afraid to trust, to build community. They regurgitate retried and refried rehashes of the past with their impoverished ideas rotting from the head like dead fish. Having whistled up the wind they now must ride their own whirlwind.

Instead, we should look to the hills for help and into the eyes of our sisters and brothers for possibilities. We have been through a lot together. We should take these next steps together. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

gut yom tov,