An Egregious Elimination of the Black Vote in Newbern, AL: Yes, this still happens in the rural South in 2024
I take a one newsletter post respite from sharing elements of my personal story to write about a recent event that demonstrates how systemic racism can operate at the very local level. I then expand on that story to remind us the efforts to repress the Black vote - whether overtly or covertly - happen far too often.
I’ve been following a four-part story from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) ?all summer and last week, the story concluded with a happy “ending.” SPLC is a Montgomery, AL-based non-profit organization committed to addressing racial and social injustices across the South. It was founded in 1971 by two White, Alabama-based lawyers; their first president was civil rights legend Julian Bond. I have subscribed to their newsletters for years and pay close attention to their annual report, “The Year in Hate and Extremism.”
The story centers around Newbern, Alabama (population 133 in the 2020 Census, although local officials say it is closer to 150 to 200, but that’s another story) and its mayor, Patrick Braxton. Newbern is currently just less than 70% Black.
When Braxton was sworn into office in late June 2020, he became the town’s first Black mayor in its 170-year history. He ran unopposed, and not a single vote was cast in that summer’s election because he was the only candidate to qualify. He quickly appointed five Black volunteer town council members.
Within weeks, based on guidance from the previously seated White mayor and council received from the Alabama League of Municipalities, the election was changed from late August 2020 to early October 2020, and the qualification period was reopened. They did this without any public notice. This move put them back in power immediately, and when they held the election that October, the White mayor, and 5 White councilmembers returned to office, having never allowed Braxton or his hand-chosen councilmembers to assume their rightfully earned positions.
As the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) discovered in their research, Newburn’s town government functioned for more than a century with White “office holders … passing power from one to another” without ever holding elections or votes being cast. This is
how Whites in the town remained in power despite being a racial minority (by the 2020s, comprising just above 30% of the population). The process the White town leaders have practiced for decades violates the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibits this type of racial discrimination.
If this sounds like something out of the first half of the 20th century, it’s because it is. This is straight out of the Jim Crow playbook.
Fortunately, due to the good works of LDF and others, it got resolved as it should have, but certainly not in the ways it could have (i.e., the good ol’ boys retained power for another few decades). LDF and other attorneys negotiated an agreement in which the White mayor and council members agreed to step down nearly 3.5 years after they had removed Braxton from office in 2020, allowing Braxton to assume the mayoral responsibilities on July 26, 2024. Before re-assuming the office, Braxton negotiated the construction of a new sewage treatment plant (in collaboration with Auburn University), the first in the town’s history. Upon signing the settlement agreement, Braxton did something unheard of in a town built upon sustained racism and bigotry: he submitted five people – two of them White, three of them Black – to be appointed to the town council until the next elections occur in 2025. Braxton indicated he tried to appoint a council with a similar racial composition in 2020, but no White folks were willing to assume the role. This time, he found two.
An accomplishment like this does not end the story, though. It’s essential to recognize that a number of White families have already put their houses on the market in the weeks since the decision was made.
This is the rural version of White flight. When Whites can no longer retain power or retain numbers that can keep them in power, many take flight. That story has been repeated in Alabama and across at least a couple of dozen states in the past 60-70 years.
Ongoing Efforts to Restrict the Black Vote
For sure, Newbern is an outlier when it comes to egregious and racist violations of the vote in America. Yet, it is not an outlier in terms of Whites’ persistence in remaining in power. All we have to remember is Ferguson, Missouri, the town where Michael Brown was killed by a police officer, launching the Black Lives Matter movement. After this homicide, the U.S. Department of Justice discovered that even though Blacks were 67% of the Ferguson population compared to Whites at 29%, 94% of the Ferguson police force was White, and about 90% of the stops, searches, and arrests in 2013 by police were of African Americans. (2013 Data from the Missouri Attorney General’s Office, PolitiFact.com, St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and U.S. Census Bureau[i])
At the time of Brown’s killing, the town had a White mayor, a city council with only one Black member, and a school board with none.
As I explore in my new book (It’s Never Been a Level Playing Field), specific segments of the White population in the U.S. have remained persistent in their efforts to limit the Black vote and even the teaching of the history of racism in America.
Although efforts to restrict the Black vote never really ended after the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965—in fact, there were thousands of local efforts in the South from that year through the early 2010s—state and local efforts in the South became re-emboldened when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), struck down a key provision of the Act—the coverage formula in Section 4b—determining it was outdated.
Why outdated? Because the court saw that voter registration rates for Whites and Blacks in these states had more or less equalized. Yet, those rates had only reached near-equal status because the U.S. Department of Justice turned away thousands of those state and local efforts to restrict the Black vote for more than four decades.
Since 2013, this decision has precipitated an avalanche of voting law changes, with the avalanche crescendoing in the early 2020s.
Thanks for reading Leveling the Playing Field (finally!) ! This post is public so feel free to share it.
In 2021 alone, nineteen states instituted thirty-four new restrictive laws; eight more states enacted nearly a dozen restrictive laws in 2022, with more than thirty states readying more than 100 additional restrictive bills for consideration in 2023.[ii] Four of the seven states subject to statewide Section 5 coverage were among the most active in passing restrictive laws in 2021: Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, and Louisiana. Iowa, Arizona, Florida, Texas, and Montana kept pace with those four states with their own restrictive laws. Among the laws passed were restrictions that did the following:
How do these changes to the law disproportionately impact Black voters? For example, many polling places no longer available for voting were in or near Black neighborhoods, so they had to travel farther to one that was open. The same applies to the ballot drop boxes; many located in or near Black residential areas were eliminated.
Black people also disproportionately work in jobs where it is far more challenging to get off from work on voting day; thus, restrictions to early voting mean they lose most of their options for days and times in which they are more likely to vote. Black churches were instrumental in encouraging African Americans to vote on Sundays after church, but by eliminating Sunday voting, states reduced the opportunity for those likely to vote on that day. And so on.
In states that now require a resident to register to vote only if they have a current government-issued ID, it impacts Black people disproportionately, as 25 percent nationally do not have such an ID. Whites are at 8 percent nationally. In Georgia, 80 percent of voters who didn’t meet the state’s new “exact match” ID law were African American residents.[iv] The millions of Americans who don’t have these IDs are “disproportionately low-income, racial and ethnic minorities, the elderly, and people with disabilities. Such voters more frequently have difficulty obtaining ID because they cannot afford or cannot obtain the underlying documents that are a prerequisite to obtaining [a] government-issued photo ID card.”[v]
A 2021 Brennan Center for Justice study showed that changes made since 2013 dramatically altered the White-Black turnout gap in the six states subject to preclearance in the 1965 Act. Whereas by 2013, Black citizens had achieved a slightly higher voter turnout in each of these states, the change brought about by the Supreme Court’s decision led to decreases in Black turnout to such a degree that by 2020, in five of those states, the White turnout rate had grown from anywhere between six percent to 15 percent larger than that of Blacks.[vi]
FOOTNOTES
[i]. “Race in St. Louis: By the Numbers,” St. Louis Magazine, October 17, 2014, https://www.stlmag.com/news/race-in-st.-louis-by-the-numbers/.
[ii]. “Voting Laws Roundup: December 2022,” Brennan Center for Justice, December 2022, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-december-2022.
[iii]. “The New Voter Suppression,” The Brennan Center for Justice, 2022, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/new-voter-suppression.
[iv]. Theodore R. Johnson and Max Feldman, “The New Voter Suppression,” Brennan Center for Justice, January 16, 2020, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/new-voter-suppression.
[v]. “Oppose Voter ID Legislation – Fact Sheet,” American Civil Liberties Union, https://www.aclu.org/fact-sheet/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-sheet.
[vi]. Kevin Morris, Peter Miller, and Coryn Grange, “Racial Turnout Gap Grew in Jurisdictions Previously Covered by the Voting Rights Act,” Brennan Center for Justice, August 20, 2021, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/racial-turnout-gap-grew-jurisdictions-previously-covered-voting-rights.
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6 个月Congratulations on your book, Steve Brigham. This is really important research and work that you are doing.