Cheapening the memory of Jim Crow

Reasonable minds can disagree, I suppose, on the wisdom of Georgia's new voting law. For my part, nothing about it strikes me as especially dastardly, let alone racist — and I say that after having read detailed analyses of the law's main provisions, including a 5,000-word breakdown by The New York Times that was plainly intended to be unfavorable. I haven't found the ferocious attack mounted on the law by progressive activists to be very persuasive, but I acknowledge that people of goodwill might come to a different conclusion.

That said, not every charge made by those condemning the law falls into the category of honest opinion: Some of it is just dead wrong. For example, President Biden, by way of explaining why he considers Georgia's new law to be "sick" and "outrageous" and "un-American," claimed repeatedly that it requires the polls to be shut at 5 p.m., thereby keeping working people from voting.

"You're going to close a polling place at 5 o'clock, when working people just get off?" he said in an ESPN interview. "This is all about keeping working folks, and ordinary folks that I grew up with, from being able to vote."

But as The Washington Post's fact checker concluded, this was a "Four Pinnochio" whopper, completely at odds with the truth. (The Post, it should be noted, editorialized against the new law.) Far from curtailing voting hours, the new law expands them and also adds an extra Saturday of voting.

The new law also confirms that Georgians have the right to vote absentee without having to give a reason, and it provides a three-month window before an election in which absentee ballots can be requested. It authorizes at least one drop box per county for the convenience of early voters (more populous counties can install additional drop boxes), thus institutionalizing a practice that didn't exist in Georgia before the COVID-19 pandemic.

It empowers the state attorney general to set up a hotline to report any allegations of possible voter intimidation or fraud. And, yes, it prohibits activists from giving voters standing in line "any money or gifts, including, but not limited to, food and drink." These tweaks may be sound or unsound, but how anyone can honestly call them "sick," "outrageous," or "un-American" beats me.

What I really find incomprehensible, though, is the accusation that Georgia's law amounts to a revival of Jim Crow, the pre-Civil Rights racial oppression that prevailed throughout the South. It is hard to overstate what a smear and a libel that is. Second only to slavery, Jim Crow segregation and persecution was the very worst thing in American history — evil, unconstitutional, and inhumane.

Jim Crow was a monstrosity in numerous ways, only one of which was the near-total denial of the right of Black Southerners to vote. Eventually Jim Crow was overturned by the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and a generation of Americans has grown up knowing of it, if at all, only through history books.

To call something "Jim Crow" is the equivalent in American terms of calling something "Nazi" — both are terms so toxic that they should be reserved only for genuine examples of brutal, totalitarian repression and cruelty. Covid lockdown critics over the past year who have likened mask requirements to the tactics of Nazi Germany weren't just engaging in hate speech. They were demeaning the memory of Germany's countless victims, and trivializing the ghastly history bound up in the word "Nazi." Any American who uses the term "Jim Crow" in the same irresponsible, incendiary manner is guilty of much the same thing.

And yet there has been no shortage of Americans doing exactly that, from the Georgia director of the ACLU to Democratic politician Stacey Abrams to progressive legal activists to, most dismayingly of all, the president of the United States, who slammed Georgia's law as not merely the return of Jim Crow, but "Jim Crow on steroids."

I understand that politicians and polemicists routinely use over-the-top language to score points and belittle their opponents, but to casually toss about a slur like "Jim Crow" is grotesque and indecent. What occurred under the rubric of Jim Crow was little better than apartheid — and sometimes far worse . Through deceitful voting rules, enforced segregation, and the denial of due process, Black Southerners were locked out of any role in the American political system. They were barred from voting, barred from seeking public office, barred from getting a decent public education, and barred from most public accommodations.

But in the 50-plus years since Jim Crow was crushed, Black people in Georgia and elsewhere across the South are anything but shut out of the political system. "Georgia's congressional delegation has five Black representatives and one Black senator," writes Jonah Goldberg . "Its state legislature is 27 percent Black. The mayor of Atlanta is a Black woman. Georgia has a large and politically powerful Black middle class, not to mention plenty of Black celebrities and 1-percenters. Do we really believe the state is one election law away from a system of legal lynchings and separate water fountains?"

To repeat: Maybe you think that the changes adopted in Georgia's new voting statute are unsound or disgraceful; maybe you think they were deliberately designed to make it marginally more difficult for Democrats to influence elections. Maybe you even think that they were purposely crafted to make it likelier that Black voters will be dissuaded from voting. Does that add up to "Jim Crow on steroids"? Only to someone utterly ignorant of Jim Crow's history — or utterly unconcerned with the truth.

To my mind, it is condescending and faintly racist to believe that nonwhite voters are less adept than anyone else at registering to vote and casting a ballot. Black voter turnout in Georgia surged in 2018 and surged last November. It surged yet again in January's runoff, which sent two new Democratic senators to Washington, including Raphael Warnock, the first African American ever to represent Georgia in the Senate. But even if you do believe that Black citizens are more easily discouraged from voting than white citizens, nothing about the new law is remotely comparable to the kind of voter suppression that used to be standard in American South.

Here's a glimpse at the history of Jim Crow vote suppression.

"Before a Southern Negro [sic] is allowed to vote, he must often be ‘approved' by a (white) Board of Registrars, a Board which proves difficult to locate in many county areas," reported Jack H. Pollack in The American Mercury in 1947. After filling out the necessary forms and paying the required fee, white applicants were usually approved without challenge. But for Black applicants, the obstacles were just beginning. Under Jim Crow, Southern officials used "economic pressures, white primaries, poll taxes, ‘grandfather clauses,' intimidation, and even outright violence to keep the ballot from Negroes," Pollack recounted. In many Southern polling places, "the visible or implied warning sign … was: ‘Negroes, Vote at Your Own Risk.'"

A favorite means of keeping Black men and women from registering to vote was the bogus "literacy test." In Georgia it was common to require Black applicants to "read, repeat, or interpret the Federal or State Constitution." That question was used so often that many Black citizens intent on gaining the vote would go through a months-long ordeal of memorizing both constitutions, until they knew them word for word, wrote Pollack. "But as one Georgia official reflected, "Negroes can still be required to write the Constitution and then be disqualified if they leave out any commas."

Next to the Constitutional bogey, the most frequent trap "question" in Southern literacy tests is to translate — and spell correctly — obscure Latin phrases. A Negro veteran who recently tried to register in Jackson, Mississippi, was asked, "What is the meaning of Itar, E. Quar Tum Entertia Ventricular?" Shortly afterwards, another Negro was asked, "What does a writ of Certiorari, Writ Error Coraim Nobis, Subpoena Duces Tecum mean?" . . . [R]egistrars reject Negro applicants for not properly answering such "intelligent questions" as "Boy, what's the meaning of delicut status quo rendum hutt?" If the bewildered applicant ponders the phrase, the registrar continues: "Maybe that's too hard for you. Here's an easy one. If the angle plus the hypotenuse equals the subdivided of the fraction, then how many children did your mother miss having?"

Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.

In 1964, John Hersey described in the Saturday Evening Post the relentless humiliation would-be Black voters continued to face in the Jim Crow South. Applicants would be kept waiting outdoors, in blistering heat, for hours on end before finally being summoned to the registrar of voters. Hersey wrote of Varsell Pleas, one in a group of 17, who was given the registration form to complete, and required to copy out and explain Section 76 of the state constitution: "In all elections by the legislature the members shall vote viva voce, and the vote shall be entered on the journals."

Pleas had been studying the constitution for several weeks, and he knew several of the 28 sections of Article 3, the state's bill of rights, by heart, but there were 285 clauses in the whole document, and he had never happened to find out the meaning of the phrase "viva voce." . . . When Pleas handed in the test, the lady in the office told him to come back in 30 days and find out whether he had passed or not. . . .

[A month later] Varsell Pleas went up to Athens and asked — knowing what the answer would be — whether he had been passed for registration. The lady in the office got out his application and she said, "No, Varsell, you didn't pass."

"Can you tell me, ma'am, just where I didn't pass?"

The lady gave both sides of the sheet a quick look, and she said, "No, it just says, ‘Failed.' It doesn't say why. You just failed, that's all."

"Yes, ma'am," said Varsell Pleas, and went home. Not one of the 17 had passed.

Across the 11 states of the former Confederacy, notes historian Robert A. Caro in the introduction to Master of the Senate, part of his monumental biography of Lyndon Johnson, just 1 in 5 of the more than 6 million African American citizens eligible to vote succeeded in registering. "Of course, even those blacks who had registered to vote often didn't dare go to the polls to cast ballots, because of fear of violence or economic retaliation," Caro added. "In 1957, there were scores of counties in the South which had tens of thousands of black residents, but in which, in some elections, not a single vote had been cast by a black."

That was Jim Crow.

By all means, denounce Georgia's new law, if you genuinely think it deserves denouncing. But don't pretend that it contains anything even vaguely reminiscent of the inhuman Jim Crow obstacles that for decades deliberately disenfranchised Black citizens. Georgia today has millions of active Black voters, and no law tinkering at the margins with the state's election procedures is going to deny them their rights. In fact, predicts Nate Cohen , the New York Times's elections and demographics guru, "the law's voting provisions are unlikely to significantly affect turnout or Democratic chances. It could plausibly even increase turnout."

Like "Holocaust," "slavery," and "genocide," the term "Jim Crow" is drenched in a history of pain, cruelty, and lethal humiliation. Such terms should be deployed with profound and respectful care, and never merely to score a cheap political point.