Eddie was one of hundreds of thousands of predominantly Black and Brown victims that year of a new voter ID law in Wisconsin that, according to one study, successfully suppressed 200,000 votes in 2016. Donald Trump won the state by 22,748 votes.
When I reflect on these two stories, I think of how much more similar they are than different. I think of the fact that, a half century later, Black people in this country are still struggling for the right to vote. I think of the fact that white supremacy and voter suppression, though they look different today, are still very much alive—and flourishing.
In 2013 I was in New York City working in city politics when the Shelby County v. Holder decision came down, bringing down with it crucial parts of the Voting Rights Act. I had only recently left the Obama administration. Barack Obama had cobbled together a mighty coalition of people young and old, Black and white. The diversity of the coalition that backed him demonstrated the future he sought, one where people of all backgrounds would come together and push our great nation forward. The power of that thought, the audacity of his imagination to dream of what a better, more inclusive country might look like, frightened many who saw their lives dependent on the continuation of a racial hierarchy.
I think many of us were naïve then. We thought things would only get better, not worse. Many thought of the election of Barack Obama, not as the end of racism, but certainly as a turning point. And it was. But for many, President Obama’s election was a turning point in a different direction. It spurred a backlash among white supremacists invested in maintaining the status quo.
It can be no coincidence that the carnage of the Voting Rights Act so central to the Shelby decision occurred during the presidency of our first-ever Black president. It is no coincidence that in the decade since Obama’s election, voter suppression has gained more momentum, velocity, and animosity than it had in the previous three elections combined. Since Shelby County v. Holder, voter suppression has taken on more pervasive and pernicious forms than ever before.
Voter purges are on the rise. Between 2006 and 2008, states removed 4 million voters from their rolls, as they are permitted to do under the Constitution in order to maintain the accuracy of their voter rolls. Between 2014 and 2016, that number jumped to 16 million people. Voter ID laws, like the one that stopped Eddie Holloway, Jr., from voting in the 2016 election, have seeped into state constitutions across the country. Felon disenfranchisement laws and voter access laws run rampant.
It was, technically, a change in the law that spurred these vile additions to voter suppression. But it had much more to do with what had happened five years before Shelby County v. Holder, with the election of President Obama. His election signaled that the direction of power in this country was shifting; the growth in voter suppression we’ve seen over the last decade is a response to that election and to that signal.
Laws alone have never changed this country. The Voting Rights Act would never have happened without the Freedom Rides, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the brave souls who sat at that lunch counter at Woolworth’s in 1960. The Voting Rights Act, as historic and critical as it was, was not enough to give Otis Moss, Sr., his vote.
At the March on Washington in 1963, John Lewis was just twenty-three years old. Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, he said:
To those who have said, “Be patient and wait,” we have long said that we cannot be patient. We do not want our freedom gradually, but we want to be free now! We are tired. We are tired of being beaten by policemen. We are tired of seeing our people locked up in jail over and over again. And then you holler, “Be patient.” How long can we be patient? We want our freedom and we want it now….We must say: “Wake up America! Wake up!” For we cannot stop, and we will not and cannot be patient.
When it comes to our democracy, and who we determine to have the right to vote—our most sacred of rights—patience is no virtue. We must never be patient when someone else’s rights are in the balance. We cannot wait on laws, or elected officials, or anyone else. The only virtue when it comes to the right to vote is impatience.
2014–2019
BLACK LIVES MATTER
Alicia Garza
Change does not occur without backlash—at least, any change worth having—and that backlash is an indicator that the change is so powerful that the opposing forces resist that change with everything they have.
On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown was shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, a small suburb outside St. Louis. His body lay in the street for four hours as angry crowds gathered, demanding to know why an eighteen-year-old boy had been shot and killed by police just steps away from his mother’s home. After Brown was shot, he reportedly was still alive, and yet he was denied medical attention. Later that afternoon the crowd erupted and began to march to the Ferguson police station a few blocks away.
What unfolded that fateful day is painful and complex. It is a story that the people who joined in that uprising that day and in the days, weeks, months, and years afterward are most fit to tell. Storytelling is often connected to power and influence, and even today the voices of activists in Ferguson, from their own perspectives and viewpoints, are too hard to come by and often eclipsed by those who want to center themselves within a story that is not their own.
Such has been the case with Black Lives Matter, which I started with Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi a little more than a year prior to Brown’s death, after the acquittal in 2013 of George Zimmerman in the murder of Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager, in Sanford, Florida. Such has been the case with all social movements as we seek to best understand their origins, their impacts, their failures, and their methods and strategies.
There are lessons that can be drawn from this tapestry of stories that point to a simple truth—Black lives still do not matter in American society. Whether it be the murder of Trayvon Martin by a vigilante, the murder of Michael Brown by a local police officer, the murder of Renesha McBride by a private citizen, the murder of Kayla Moore by police officers, the murder of Mia Henderson, or the mysterious death of Sandra Bland, who was found dead in a jail cell she should not have been in after a routine traffic stop—Black lives, be they poor or middle class, transgender or cisgender, disabled, adult or child, are seen as disposable.
The movement addressing this simple yet painful truth has deep historical roots. It has emerged from previous iterations not only to fight back against the state-sanctioned violence occurring against Black people each and every day. The movement has declared that all Black lives are worth fighting for.
This Black Renaissance understands that it is not only cisgender, heterosexual middle-class Black people who deserve to live full and dignified lives, but also Black people who are subject to discrimination, oppression, and marginalization of many types all at once. It was this Black Renaissance that propelled activists to refuse to allow traditional Black church leaders to speak on their behalf, to tell them to go home in the dead of night and be content with allowing the system to run its course as Michael Brown lay dying in the street. It is this Black Renaissance that declares that the lives of Black transgender women must not end in homicide before they are thirty-five years old. It is this Black Renaissance that refuses to make the coffee and the copies while the men do the real work. It is this Black Renaissance that questions the stated role of policing in this country, and that calls attention to the Black disabled people who are killed at eight times the rate of people who are not disabled. This Black Renaissance has dutifully carried on the tradition of resistance that our ancestors gifted us, and it has continued to push for the changes that they did not complete.