As the the 150th anniversary of the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution — giving African Americans the right to vote — draws to a close, I’ve got Georgia on my mind. Much of adult America is thinking about the upcoming Jan. 5, 2021, U.S. Senate runoff election in the state as well. The stakes are enormous.
The Democrats will need to win both contested Georgia Senate seats in order to retake the control of the upper chamber, thereby positioning Congress to unite with incoming President Joe Biden to raise America out of the lunacy emanating from the Trump White House. The Black vote will be crucial here.
Before Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman tore across Georgia and burned Atlanta in the summer of 1864 — tremendously advancing the Union’s Civil War fortunes — Black Georgians, overwhelmingly an enslaved caste, could not vote. The last of the post-Civil War Reconstruction amendments, the 15th Amendment, in unambiguous prose, declared that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or condition of previous service. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article through appropriate legislation.” For ratification, 28 states were needed. Georgia was the 27th state to ratify the amendment.
Like many of the phrases of freedom in the nation’s founding and related documents, those in the 15th Amendment — established in 1870 — were rendered meaningless for Blacks in Georgia and the other Southern states. For nearly 100 years, the Ku Klux Klan and its white supremacist co-conspirators practicing American apartheid disenfranchised African American citizens.
One Black Georgian who challenged this anti-democratic practice was the late great U.S. Rep. John Lewis, of Atlanta, a driving force behind the 55-year-old Voting Rights Act of 1965. I never met him in my travels through life. But I nearly did.
I was assigned by local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People President M. Gayle Moss to introduce keynote speaker John Lewis at the 55th annual Pittsburgh NAACP Human Rights Dinner on May 7, 2009. In that pre-Zoom era, he spoke by satellite from Washington — tied up there by a congressional floor vote — after my introduction of him from the Pittsburgh William Penn Hotel podium.
The sainted voting rights patriot accounted for his 69 years on Earth in an old-time religion stemwinder. From his family’s 110-acre chicken farm near Troy, Ala., Lewis discovered his disgust with Jim Crow racism, second-class existence and unearned white privilege. As a young man, he would be arrested 40 times when nonviolently engaging in direct-action civil disobedience confrontations. He was beaten, bloodied and racially humiliated in Alabama and Mississippi, among other places, for the offense of advocating for constitutional integration of public facilities and democratic voting.
In some mid-1960s all-Black counties in the southern United States, no one was registered to vote, Lewis explained in his speech. No more than about 2% of eligible African Americans were registered voters in numerous Alabama counties. Before eligible African Americans were denied the franchise, they were required to count first the number of bubbles on a bar of soap in some Southern jurisdictions.
On Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, the 25-year-old Lewis, then-chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, led some 600 marchers from Selma headed to Montgomery in the cause of Black Alabama voting rights. On top of his spiffy raincoat was strapped— unusual fashion for the time — a commodious backpack containing an apple, orange, toothbrush/paste and two books, his complement of in-jail supplies.
When the demonstrators reached the top of the Edmund Pettus Bridge — named for a KKK leader and slaveholding Confederate traitor — the lead state trooper thug gave the marchers three minutes to turn around before attacking them in significantly less time than that.
Beaten into unconsciousness and into history, Lewis remembered, “I thought I was going to die. ” But he did not die. He lived to work with Martin Luther King Jr. and President Lyndon Johnson to establish the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the powerful weaponized arm of the 15th Amendment.
Vindication of the Lewis praise of the NAACP, and his insistence that freedom lovers never let up, was his election to Congress, the 2008 election of first Black President Barack Obama and something else. The visionary who died last July 17 said one Caucasian policeman who brutalized him decades earlier found him, cried, hugged him and apologized. Lewis cried and hugged him in unimaginable magnanimity.
“Never give up,” the lawmaker admonished that 2009 Pittsburgh NAACP audience.
Languishing in Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s U.S. Senate bill cemetery, the Democrat-sponsored 2019-2020 amendment-update to the U.S. Supreme Court-diminished 1965 voting rights legislation appears doomed in the Senate Republican graveyard. For resurrection, we look to the Black Georgia electorate to help defeat Republicans David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, evict them from the Senate and flip the body for Democratic agendas.
Moreover, the Black turnout against those respective incumbent Georgia Republicans to elect Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff must be far stronger than it was for the Democrats’ Biden-Harris presidential ticket on Nov. 3. Success would snatch America from the authoritarian jaws of Trumpian depravity, moving us toward the normalcy of the merely crazy, messy, lovable republic within which patriotic Americans love to fight to render America more perfect and, as Georgian John Lewis has demanded, “Never ever give up.”
Robert Hill is a Pittsburgh-based communications consultant.
First Published: December 22, 2020, 5:00 a.m.