Voter Suppression, 2012

The Reverend Al Sharpton and Congressman John Lewis are currently in the middle of a re-enactment of the famous 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery voting-rights march on which Lewis was nearly beaten to death by the forces of Alabama law. You may have missed this because the coverage of it has been, well, sparse. But listening to the reaction by the other side, you find yourself in a genuine timewarp:

"I understand that most of these leaders are out-of-state agitators and they're here because the law is working," said Alabama Federation of Republican Women president Elois Zeanah.

[...]

In 1965, John Lewis was not really an out-of-state agitator. He was born in Troy and went to school in Brundage. But he went to college at Fisk in Nashville so, when the Alabama state troopers broke his head for him because he was trying to register to vote, I guess he was sort of an out-of-state agitator. And now, since he's a congressman from Georgia, he's one again.

[...]

Over the last couple of weeks, as the presidential debate turned laughably into an argument about contraception, I have heard a lot of people complain that this issue "was settled back in the 1950's/1960's." This is a complaint I never have heard from any veteran of the civil rights movement, and they've seen the achievements that many of them bled and died for rolled back in one way or another ever since St. Reagan kicked off his triumphant 1980 campaign talking about States Rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi, not all that far from where they'd once dug Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney out of an earthen dam. They all know how fragile were the victories they'd won. They accepted that as the ongoing part of the struggle that continues today. John Lewis is marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge again this week. People should be listening to him. Nobody, god willing, will try to kill him this time. They're satisfied merely with killing his legacy, one state at a time. The worst crimes against democracy are always the ones committed under the law.

  Charles Pierce