The above quote crystalizes the idea that, while racial slavery was abolished in the 19^th century, many aspects of that system continue to shape our economy if not also persist under different names. In this second blog post for Human Trafficking Awareness Month, I emphasize the importance of explicitly connecting the past and present when it comes to worker’s rights and the persistence of unfree labor.

Why does this connection matter? When human trafficking is treated as a new (and distinctly different) problem from historical slavery, we can lose touch with how the demise of slavery continues to shape economic and social relations. As a result, we move further away from reckoning with the living legacies of slavery as central to contemporary social justice struggles. The reality is we are still very much living in a world shaped by the African slave trade and European colonialism.

While much has changed since the 16^th and even the 19^th centuries, there continues to be an enduring and evolving reliance on unfree and low-wage labor. This is particularly obvious in the legacy industries of plantation slavery like the agricultural sector. In the U.S., this reliance started in the slave-based economies of the past and transformed as the institution of chattel slavery was formally abolished. While it became illegal to trade and own people, it was not illegal to expect that certain forms of labor be done for very little pay and under a certain degree of coercion. For example, Southern white land-owners in particular did not want to give up the economic benefits of unfree labor, although industry in the north also was dependent on repressed commodity prices made possible by that same labor. The challenge was how to rebrand unfree labor as something other than slavery. Consequently, new categories of labor and labor contracts emerged in order to feed the demand for unfree and low-wage labor. It is crucial we remember that the continued under-valuing and de-valuing of the racialized labor once performed by Black slaves is a legacy of African slavery.

New Systems, Similar Results

An example of a new labor category was the convict lease system used by local governments, white farmers and corporations. The system essentially replicated a slave labor force by using so-called Black Codes (in effect anti-Black codes) to incriminate newly freed African Americans for anything from walking on the “wrong” side of the train tracks to vagrancy and unemployment. Many are familiar with the impact of the Black Codes on the ongoing criminalization of Black life in America, especially in regard to policing and sentencing.

When we consider how anti-Black racism has contributed to the over-incarceration of African Americans in the U.S. prison system, it is not hard to see how a form of convict leasing still operates today. Prison labor is a multi-billion dollar industry, and while different from the convict leasing system in important ways, it is still the one loop-hole in the 13^th Amendment that technically allows for slave labor. Incarcerated workers can receive important training and job skills, but they are one of the most vulnerable and exploitable work forces in our system. They are asked to fight fires, make PPE during a pandemic, and recycle waste yet are frequently unable to set the terms of their labor contracts. Furthermore, the impact of incarceration on someone’s prospects for work once they are released is still highly detrimental, from wage decreases to outright refusal to be hired. Some businesses and municipalities are “banning the box” as a way to advance the rights of formerly incarcerated people.

Convict Leasing of Children, 1903, Library of Congress, Source: Wikimedia Commons

Yet, another dimension of that legacy is the ongoing racialization (and criminalization) of select laborers including non-white and migrant workers. U.S. immigration law has a long history of racism and abuse that is relevant to understanding the enduring legacies of slavery here and globally. While systems of migrant labor contracts existed before slavery was outlawed, our dependance on migrant and immigrant labor significantly deepened after emancipation.

Along with increased demand for cheap labor, there were shifting rationalizations for why certain ethnic groups were “better” able to perform certain jobs. These rationalizations were used to validate migrant labor contract systems (such as the Bracero program) which also gave legitimacy to repressing wages. It was harder to reduce the wages of white farmworkers than non-white and non-U.S. citizen workers. Thus, it benefited the farm owners and corporations to have low-wage migrant laborers. At the same time, migrant and immigrant workers were subject to virulent racist backlash both in their local communities and from the federal government. The Chinese Exclusion Act is an early example of that backlash and its impact is still evident today with examples of anti-Asian racism. Another example is the criminalization of immigrants, migrants and refugees from Central and Latin America and Mexico.

The struggle for farmworker’s rights has a long and vibrant history in the United States that intersects with other civil rights movements, including Black freedom struggles and Indigenous rights movements. While recent attention to human trafficking has increased awareness of the essential yet often vulnerable labor of farmworkers, it is important to contextualize these more recent anti-trafficking efforts in this broader history because migrant farmworker activism is and has been the primary engine behind advancing worker’s rights in the agricultural sector. From the coalition of Mexican and Filipino American workers who led a nation-wide strike of grape growers in Delano, California in 1965 and birthed the modern farmworker movement, to the recent Fair Food boycott of fast food chains who refuse to ensure migrant farmworker rights on tomato farms, farmworker-led organizations are essential to abolishing unfree labor. This context also is important because as attention has grown in the U.S  for what is called “domestic trafficking” (a term used to describe sex trafficking of U.S. citizens and legal residents) and cast as “modern day slavery” “in our own backyard” attention has turned away from an injustice that has long been in our own backyards – the exploitation of migrant and immigrant labor.

Source: Coalition for Immokalee Workers

It is vitally important that anti-trafficking efforts recognize the connections between unfree labor and the history of slave economies and racist immigration laws. When human trafficking is treated as a contemporary aberration rather than as intertwined in the legacies and endurance of old systems, then efforts to advance human rights may in fact undermine them. As we learned from Silvia Perez and Uriel Zelaya-Perez of the Coalition for Immokalee Workers during our webinar on January 22, human trafficking and slave-like conditions exist on a spectrum of labor exploitation including wage theft and gender-based violence. We must address the entire spectrum in order to create a more just and equitable food system and one that does not operate in the long shadow of African slavery. This is relevant more than ever as we depend on farmworkers as essential workers during the Covid-19 pandemic. They risk their lives in order to ensure food stays on our tables. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers as well as the Ohio-based Justice for Migrant Women have COVID-relief campaigns for farmworkers. Supporting farmworker-led organizations is one of the most important ways to fight human trafficking.

Read Human Trafficking Awareness Month: Making Connections to Social Justice Part I

On the eve of the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation in January 2010, President Barack Obama issued his own proclamation declaring the month of January “National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month.” President Obama’s speech, quoted above, crystallized a rhetorical and ethical link between transatlantic slavery and “modern day slavery.” He also connected the history of abolishing chattel slavery with the contemporary fight against human trafficking. These are powerful connections, and they illustrate how the historical struggle to abolish slavery is called on to amplify political and public concern for human trafficking today.

Connections or Tensions?

However, drawing equivalence between historical slavery and human trafficking can be problematic too. The comparison implies that the historical enslavement of Africans is only relevant today as an analogy for something else. Moreover, the growth in attention and resources to combat human trafficking have not brought greater awareness to the enduring and evolving legacies of chattel slavery, including cultural and institutionalized forms of anti-Black racism on African Americans. Yet, the historical fight to abolish slavery is often used to give ethical gravitas to the work of anti-trafficking. This unevenness begs the question, “What are the connections between human trafficking and the legacies of slavery?”

There is an urgency to that question because of unremitting anti-Black violence perpetuated by routine police shootings, the criminalization of Black life, and the system-wide failure of the criminal “justice” system. The struggles against that violence reached a fever pitch this past summer and the outrage continues as white supremacy is validated even at the highest levels of political office. What connections are there between these struggles and the issue of human trafficking?

Source: Nicole Baster via Unsplash

In the spirit of human trafficking awareness month, I delve into two connections that raise the important if not also thorny issues for aligning the struggle against human trafficking and the ongoing struggles for racial justice. In Part I of this series, I address the problematic issue of how anti-trafficking efforts often align with, rather than challenge, racial violence. In Part II, I discuss the legacy of slave economies on unfree and exploited agricultural labor. These topics also are the focus of two virtual conversations organized by the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center and for which I will be a guest host. Join us for these live conversations!

• Human Trafficking: Who’s at Risk? - January 13 at 2:00 pm
• Human Rights: Fair Food at the Kitchen Table - January 22 at 2:00 pm

Carceral Human Rights

There has long been a human rights deficit at the center of anti-trafficking. The problem is that the criminal legal system is used as the primary mechanism for combating human trafficking. While human trafficking should be against the law, anti-trafficking strategies are narrowly focused on what scholars and activists call a “carceral” approach to human rights. A carceral approach heavily relies on policing and the criminal legal system to promote human rights. As a result, a carceral approach brings considerable collateral damage because “human rights” are marshalled to reinforce and intensify the policing, surveillance, and arresting of populations who are already over-policed, surveilled and incarcerated – Black folks, Indigenous people, people of color, immigrants, and folks facing financial and housing insecurity. Moreover, carceral human rights assume that justice for the victim/survivor hinges primarily on adjudicating the harm of trafficking and not also addressing systemic racism, poverty, heteropatriarchy, transphobia and white supremacy.

It also should be noted that prosecuting trafficking is very difficult. Arrest rates for trafficking may go up with awareness, but prosecution rates remain relatively low. Ultimately, while a difficult truth to swallow, anti-trafficking agendas today implicitly support systems of oppression and violence endemic to policing, border control, prisons, and detention centers.

Criminalizing Survivors

The incarceration of survivors of gender and sexual violence is routinely ignored if not silenced in mainstream anti-trafficking organizations. Yet, it is evident from the struggle to free Joanne Little in the 1970s to the recent mobilization for Bresha Meadows that women, girls and femmes who are Black, Indigenous, immigrant or people of color are more likely to be criminalized for having defended themselves from gender-based violence. This is especially the case for queer, non-binary, and trans folks whose experiences often are erased in mainstream social justice efforts. Organizations such as Survived & Punished, a national coalition of survivors, organizers, victim advocates experts and formerly incarcerated people are advocating for the decriminalization of “efforts to survive domestic and sexual violence, support and free criminalized survivors, and abolish gender violence, policing, prisons, and deportations.” Anti-trafficking organizations are often silent about the incarceration of survivors, yet their work reinforces a policing and legal system that criminalizes BIPOC women and girls. Thus, connecting anti-trafficking to the decarceration of self-defense and survival is a critical way that advocates can re-focus their attention to forge a racial justice mission in the work of combating human trafficking.

The recent granting of clemency to Alexis Martin in Ohio is an example of how anti-trafficking organizations can re-direct. Ms. Martin was charged in a murder at the age of 17 and was only 15 when the events occurred. Her attorney did not seek protection under Ohio’s Safe Harbor Law (a law that grants protection for juveniles involved in potential sex trafficking). The fact that she was treated as an adult in the case illustrates the insidious power of racialized gender biases that contribute to higher rates of incarceration for girls of color. In particular, Black girls are treated as adults and thus not given the “benefit of the doubt” of being innocent. This case is an example of why anti-trafficking organizations should advocate for criminalized survivors. Beyond that, anti-trafficking strategies need to more directly take-on anti-racism and anti-oppression work as central to trafficking prevention which includes a broad agenda for the decarceration of survival strategies including consensual sexual labor.

Artwork by Amanda Maisel (#FreeSurvivors: Make Art for Abolition)

Re-evaluating Risk

It is often remarked that anyone can be a victim of trafficking but that some groups are more “at risk” than others. Yet, this understanding of risk treats the problem of trafficking as something that is best (or primarily) addressed at the individual rather than structural level. This is glaringly evident in the case of trafficking and sexual and gender violence against Indigenous women and girls. Indeed, treating Indigenous women and girls as a “high risk” group does little to address the root causes of oppression including the ongoing effects of U.S. colonialism on Indigenous and Native tribes and peoples.  According to legal scholar and advocate Sarah Deer, colonialism introduced rape as a war tactic against Indigenous peoples. For example, the Sioux Uprising in 1862 was related to the failure of the encroaching white settler state to investigate the sexual mistreatment of Indian women by white men. That history finds a contemporary manifestation in the fact that tribal courts do not have full jurisdiction to prosecute or enact tribal-centric resolutions to gender and sexual violence on tribal lands when non-Natives are the perpetrators. This means that non-Native perpetrators do not answer for their crimes.

Source: aaron.resist.ca

Anti-trafficking agendas should align more directly with Indigenous-centered approaches to gender violence that seek to restore and protect tribal sovereignty as the best protection from/remedy for human trafficking. That means that the problem of trafficking cannot be disentangled from the problem of colonial sexual violence. Similarly, the risk factors for exploitation are connected to structural forms of oppression that have roots in historical slavery and colonialism. But there is much that anti-trafficking agendas can do to be in the service of social justice including looking beyond carceral human rights.

Read Human Trafficking Awareness Month: Making Connections to Social Justice Part II

There are many dates that school children learn when they are taught U.S. history. Notable among them are 1863, when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and 1865, when the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed and formally outlawed slavery. While important, the dates alone do not convey the foundational significance and living legacies of slavery. The problem is not with the dates, but with the interpretation of history that they are asked to convey. 

Interpretation is what museum professionals call “the practice of communicating their collections to the public.” It is a process that broadly speaks to the importance of how we grapple with the personal and cultural relevance of any story, art object, or historical record. During my residency at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, I engage this question of interpretation to untangle the power and problem of drawing comparisons between the history of Black enslavement in the U.S. and the use of the phrase “modern day slavery” to refer to human trafficking. In a series of blog posts and public conversations, I will grapple with these tensions and reflect upon the multiple meanings of abolition today. 

My place of departure for the blog series starts from the observation made by Dr. Saidiya Hartman that “we” are living in the future created by slavery. Taken from her magnificent book Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, the sentence resonates beyond its complex implications for the descendants of slaves. Hartman interprets slavery as part of  both the past and present. She treats slavery as an inheritance, not only a chronology of events that fatefully ends with its demise. It is still difficult for many Americans, particularly white Americans, to grasp the many ways that we and our society continue to be structured by slave economies, colonialism, and the gravitational force of racism and anti-Blackness. In fact, many white Americans are unable to or refuse to connect slavery’s past to contemporary social justice issues.

The living legacies of slavery and colonialism are not hidden to Black, Indigenous, and people of color in the United States - it is white America that struggles to collectively reckon with our national DNA. For any significant grappling with the past as an inheritance, we white folks need to face the reality that slavery and colonialism continues to be in the DNA of us and our present moment. Yet, there continues to be strong, even virulent resistance to and fatigue about reckoning with that inheritance.

For many there is intense discomfort with the idea that white supremacy still has a structural hold on society. The refusal to see that stems, in part, from the long tradition of allowing guilt and shame to orchestrate white folks’ moral response to the living legacies of slavery and colonialism. When guilt and shame rule white consciousness about the past, we do not actually divest from white supremacy, but rather re-invest in the flimsy distinction between “good” versus “bad” white people. This is insufficient and actually perpetuates white supremacy, rendering it a matter of individual choices and acts. Like the material of genetic DNA, however, white supremacy self-replicates over time, although it may not look identical to earlier generations. And, like DNA, white supremacy is a trait we can not simply refuse: it requires active mitigation. The problem at the center of structural racism is the inability to dismantle white supremacy. 

In 1964, James Baldwin travelled to San Francisco to witness Black American life in what was and continues to be regarded as a liberal and cosmopolitan city. That trip is documented in the film Take This Hammer and is as piercing today as it was then in its depiction of the structural undermining of Black communities through the denial of employment and housing. At the start, Baldwin, in his quintessentially eloquent and biting way, muses that people can only pay their dues if they realize that is what they need to do. He often spoke of debts in relation to white America as he accurately saw how white superiority operates at the expense of others. Interpreting slavery as an inheritance possessed by white Americans requires ways of thinking and living that are not yet normalized or perhaps even really grapsed. As white Americans, we do not need to make a spectacle of guilt or shame or to just accurately identify the “bad guys.” We need to be willing to scrutinize our lives with humility and vulnerability and to be willing to interpret history as an inheritance that is alive in small and big ways, today.  

As I scrutinize my place in a society made by slavery, I have become wary of the moniker “modern day slavery.”  I understand that for many, naming human trafficking as “modern day slavery” is an expression of concern and ethical outrage. The phrase immediately conveys a message about injustice that perhaps is missed with the technical term “human trafficking.” Yet, the rhetorical usefulness of “modern day slavery” to convey the existence of human trafficking also has problematic material effects. That is to say, the problem with “modern day slavery” is more than a semantic issue. 

For example, while there is increased political concern for victims of trafficking, that concern has not translated into addressing the remaining debt that society still owes to the formerly enslaved and their descendants. The claim that slavery has a modern form suggests that there is an equivalency between chattel slavery and trafficking. While the idea that trafficking is modern slavery relies upon the metaphorical and moral power of the abolition of chattel slavery, that idea displaces and even conceals our responsibility to the living legacies of slavery.  As such, the term also clouds the fact that we are still operating within racial capitalism, a system produced by slaving economies. Furthermore, it is alarming that with the expansion of the anti-trafficking field, different social justice claims appear to compete rather than intersect. This tension is most apparent in regards to the role of the criminal legal system. While most anti-trafficking efforts validate and center the role of policing, courts, and incarceration these same institutions are viewed by a growing majority as the source of injustice.  

What would change if we sought out the intersections between the living legacies of slavery and colonialism and human trafficking? Likewise, how would our understanding of human trafficking change if we saw chattel slavery as not a metaphor for the present but as in the DNA of the present? Leading up to Human Trafficking Awareness Month (January) I will engage these and other questions.

November 24, 2020

The creators of GivingTuesday describe it as a “global generosity movement unleashing the power of people and organizations to transform their communities and the world.” Created in 2012, GivingTuesday had one goal in mind—create a day that inspires people to do good. Over the past seven years, it has grown into a global movement that inspires hundreds of millions of people to give, collaborate, and celebrate generosity.

This year, our community, nation, and world have faced great challenges. We’ve navigated a global pandemic and witnessed a country coming to grips with the reality of systemic racism. A spirit of unity is needed for us to move forward. Our institution serves as a beacon of hope in the ongoing struggle for inclusive freedom and we are fierce advocates of equity and justice. A donation to the National Underground Freedom Center will help us fight for a brighter, more inclusive future through education that inspires action.

Your donation will allow us to serve our community through educational programs, thought-provoking exhibitions and more. We’ve taken many of our initiatives virtual this year, propelled by the support and engagement from the community. Your donations help us to continue these conversations, allow us to preserve the artifacts in our collection, and continue to bring together diverse thought leaders to inspire action.

Your gift will power our dream of inclusive freedom for all. We would be honored to be selected as your organization of choice for GivingTuesday. Our community, nation, and world needs us both.

To make your gift, please visit our website on December 1 at freedomcenter.org/donate.

"My military career began the historic moment my proud dad (a WWII and Korean War veteran) pinned my bars onto my uniform, making me the first commissioned officer in our family’s history.  Just a few years earlier he had refused to sign papers to allow me to enlist in the Navy because he said he wanted a better future for me and believed I had greater potential.  He was right.  Military service opened doors of opportunity I could never have imagined growing up in an impoverished area on the outskirts of Little Rock, Arkansas. I began experiencing a bigger, more diverse world; learned the importance of leadership, teamwork and accountability; earned a government-financed advanced degree (MBA); and, importantly, I gained a more personal appreciation of the meaning of freedom and justice…for ALL. On this day that we recognize our veterans, I salute my dad, Woodrow Keown, Sr., for inspiring me to do more, and be more, than I thought possible."

Woodrow Keown, Jr.

President & COO
National Underground Railroad Freedom Center

My name is Dr. Jennifer Suchland. I am an Associate Professor at The Ohio State University and am honored to be in residency this academic year at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. This opportunity is made possible by a Scholars & Society fellowship from the American Council of Learned Society and Mellon Foundation.

Purpose

The aim of the fellowship is to partner scholars with non-university organizations for mutual growth and to advance the arts and humanities in society. I am excited to learn from the museum and contribute to its mission to preserve and reveal the stories of the underground railroad and inspire the public to engage in racial and social justice issues today.

Context

This is a critical moment in America. We face multiple crises including the Covid-19 pandemic and the political, economic, and ethical crises wrought by systemic racism, staggering inequities, and heterosexism. Now more than ever, people turn to universities and museums for accurate information, inspiration, guidance, and opportunities for respectful dialogue. The role of the arts and humanities is vital to the work of individually and collectively grappling with our national and global conditions and essential for imagining otherwise. I strongly believe that classrooms and museums are the democratic epicenters for encouraging critical reflection and thus are instrumental to social change.

Exploration

The broad theme of the fellowship is “Abolition Today,” which sets the stage for me to explore the multiple meanings of abolition in today’s world. For instance, those who call themselves neo-abolitionists in the fight against human trafficking (i.e. “modern day slavery”) leverage the ethical and emotional archive of the historical struggle to abolish chattel slavery in the United States. Many advocates approach anti-trafficking as the newest example of anti-slavery activism.

At the same time, other advocates are working towards prison abolition, seeking to dismantle a system that is the living legacy of Black enslavement. For them, prisons are a modern form of slavery.

As public consciousness only grows about critical issues such as mass incarceration and human trafficking, the tensions and intersections between these two abolitionist claims demands greater public reflection. Not simply an issue of semantics, the meanings of abolition today speaks to present-day ethical demands made by U.S. slavery and the political imagination needed to move beyond carceral human rights.

On a personal note, I also reflect on my position as a white cis-gendered queer middle-class woman in the context of abolition today. I want to dig deeply into the radical history of anti-slavery to better understand what it means to be abolitionist today.

Collaboration

Currently I am working with Christopher Miller, Senior Director of Education and Community Engagement, Novella Nimmo, Education Coordinator, and Asia Harris, Youth Programs Manager. In particular, Asia and I are working on revising and adding to the museum’s k-12 curriculum. I already have learned a lot about public education and the significant role that the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center plays in public education. There is a lot of demand for rigorous and thoughtful curriculum that illuminates the past and that can connect to people’s lives today. I hope to bring my scholarly expertise, which thematically is on critical human rights, as well as my experience in collaborative arts and humanities practices to the museum in this residency.

Sharing the Journey

Over the course of the academic year, keep an eye out for periodic updates here on the Freedom Center Voices blog. We invite you to follow along as I share more about my research and other topics related to the project. I’m honored to have the opportunity to connect with the Freedom Center family and excited to see where our collaboration goes.

The Presidential Election is now just a few weeks away and like many people, I find myself growing concerned about the ever-mounting presence of one topic: voter suppression.

Voter Suppression is defined as any effort, legal or illegal, to prevent eligible voters from registering to vote or casting their ballot in an election. New laws and/or administration rules that create barriers for voters are both examples of voter suppression.

This is arguably one of the United States’ most important elections. I personally feel that this moment could define my generation (hi millennials). A lot is at stake, and with the country continuing to move through a global pandemic, there are many concerns about exactly how votes will be counted this year.

For those of us who have studied history—specifically American history—we are no stranger to the idea of American voters being disenfranchised. For centuries, those in power in the United States have excluded certain people from voting based on things like race, gender, literacy, wealth and more. Most of these inhuman policies and treatments were not corrected until the passage of the Voting Rights of 1965.

Isn’t this 2020? Why and how are we still dealing with voter suppression in the United States? What does it look like? And most importantly, how can we combat it? To answer these questions, let’s first start with a little context.

Voting Rights in America

The United States of America was founded in 1776 on the basic principles of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Yet we know that the Founding Fathers were mostly concerned with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for an America full of people who looked like them—wealthy, white, and male. This sentiment is reflected in the way voting was structured at this time. Many customs from England were adopted, including the idea that only “free holding” men could vote (meaning they owned property and paid taxes). The first voters in colonial America were male property owners ages 21 and older—they were overwhelmingly white and Christian.

The result? When the first U.S. election was held in 1789 to elect President George Washington, only 6% of Americans were eligible to vote. In that same year, the Constitution granted power to the states to determine their own set of voting requirements. Many states upheld the property requirement for white males. They also passed laws limiting voting rights for African Americans and immigrants after the passage of the Naturalization Act in 1790. In the 1820s, universal white male suffrage prompted most states to forgo the property ownership rules, opening the vote up to all white men in the United States.

African American men were granted the right to vote with the passage of the 15^th Amendment in 1870. Women and other minorities would have to wait for their suffrage.

The Jim Crow Era

The Jim Crow era is the time period in American history where state and local laws were passed that enforced racial segregation and disenfranchised thousands of African Americans in the southern United States. The threat of racial violence from terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan also had an impact, discouraging many African Americans from exercising their constitutional right.

Jim Crow laws began appearing in the 1870s, a result of the failure of Reconstruction (1865-1877). Many of the Jim Crow laws specifically targeted African American voting rights. Two examples of these racist and oppressive laws were literacy tests and poll taxes.

Literacy tests began popping up in the U.S. as early as the 1850s and were predominately used as a voter suppression tactic to disenfranchise African Americans and other minority voters. Literacy tests existed in the U.S. until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. A payment of a poll tax was also required to register to vote in many states until the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

While these voter suppression tactics largely targeted African Americans in the Jim Crow South, many other minorities in the United States were subjected to these types of unjust laws—such as Native Americans, Asian Americans, immigrants and women—until the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

Above: United States President Lyndon B. Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and Rosa Parks at the signing of the Voting Rights Act on August 5, 1965

The Voting Rights Act

The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were monumental in securing rights Americans deserved. The Voting Rights Act (VRA) was expanded in 1970, 1975, 1982 and 2006—extending more voting protections each time. This resulted in many states seeing increased African American representation in elected officials. For example, the ACLU found that the number of Black elected officials in Georgia grew from 3 prior to the Voting Rights Act to 495 in 1990.

So, what happened? The Voting Rights Act was widely supported in the United States by multiple Presidents of both political parties. In fact, all 4 Presidents who signed expansions of the VRA were Republicans—Nixon, Ford, Reagan and George W. Bush. Yet since 2006, voting rights have been attacked across the country along with the introduction of new methods of voter suppression. For example, the Brennan Center for Justice found that 25 states enforced new voting requirements in 2010 such as voter ID laws, closing polling places and cutbacks to early voting.

In 2013, the Voting Rights Act was attacked again with the U.S. Supreme Court Case Shelby County v. Holder. In a 5-4 decision, Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. In response to the decision, Chief Justice John Roberts said the Voting Rights Act was based on “decades-old data and eradicated practices… such as [literary] tests” and that they “have banned nationwide for over 40 years.”

Above: States and counties encompassed by the act's coverage formula in January 2008 (excluding bailed-out jurisdictions). Several counties subsequently bailed out, but the majority of the map accurately depicts covered jurisdictions before the Supreme Court's decision in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), which declared the coverage formula unconstitutional.

Modern Voter Suppression Tactics

In addition to new voter ID laws, closure of polling places and cutbacks to early voting, states also began purging voter rolls, creating caging lists, attacking felon voter protections and enacting gerrymandering. Combined, these laws create a perfect storm of voter suppression, often targeted at communities of color.

To learn more about each voter suppression tactic, check out this article by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

In the 2016 Presidential Election, it is estimated that up to 17 states may have had restrictive voting laws in place. On the eve of another Presidential Election, many are worried these restrictive laws will negatively impact voter turnout once again. As late as August 2020, President Trump announced his opposition for additional funding for the United States Postal Service (USPS) in order to make it more difficult to deliver mail-in ballots.

Looking Ahead

When discussing voting rights in the United States, voter suppression has been a part of the nation’s history just as equally as rights granted. For more than one hundred years, elected officials have made a targeted effort to disenfranchise certain Americans, enforce structural racism and uphold white supremacy. In the 21^st Century, many of these elected officials continue to focus on communities of color, thinking of new ways to disenfranchise Americans from their constitutional right to vote.

However, the fight is not over. Now more than ever, it’s incredibly important for Americans to vote. Your voice does matter. Here are 3 things you can do:

1. In order to protect your voice, it’s important to know your rights.

The ACLU has put together a comprehensive plan to follow if you or someone you know face any issues while voting. Read it here.

2. You can also tell your Senators to pass the Voting Rights Advancement Act (VRAA),

which would enforce voting rights throughout the country. The House has already voted to pass the VRAA, but it is currently waiting in the Senate. Find more information here.

3. Finally, make a comprehensive plan on how to vote this year.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s important to determine what type of voting is available for you. For more information, check vote.org.

Most importantly—don’t give up hope. Together, we can fight for more inclusive tomorrow.

To learn more about voter suppression, consider tuning in to our upcoming program Unpacking Voter Suppression: A Virtual Discussion with Gloria Steinem, scheduled on Thursday, October 22 at 7pm.