Six decades after Jim Crow crumbled, a significant portion of the South’s white population has not accepted racial equality. In fact, these reactionaries are in the midst of an effort to restore an ersatz version of the White Man’s Republic by handicapping Black political influence on every front. That may sound like an incendiary charge–but a look at the record of Southern Republicans since Barack Obama’s election shows nothing else. Our democracy, here in the South, is an endangered species.
As it so often has, the United States Supreme Court catalyzed Southern assaults on the democratic promise. While Shelby County v. Holder was not as utterly heinous as Plessy v. Ferguson or the decision upholding Mississippi’s literacy test, Shelby opened the gates to democratic backsliding in a region that was just clawing its way out of an undemocratic past. Within 48 hours of the decision coming down, the State of North Carolina passed a voter-suppression bill that the nation’s leading expert on election law described as “the most suppressive, anti-voter legislation in decades.” Southern states followed North Carolina’s lead one by one, to the point where in 2022 every province in the former Confederacy has some form of Voter I.D.
Alas, the Supreme Court had not had its fill of anti-democracy enabling. A group of North Carolinians challenged the state’s gerrymandered electoral maps in 2019, hoping that the high court would deliver Tar Heels from yet another election held under maps that were rigged. Though even Justice Kavanaugh expressed dismay at “extreme partisan gerrymandering,” the Court ruled that federal jurists have no authority to pass judgment on the constitutionality of states’ gerrymanders. Voters had lost one of their most important protections against Southern skulduggery–the federal judiciary.
With the Voting Rights Act gutted and federal appeals for fair maps taken off the table, Southern democracy advocates find themselves in a place that strains all hope. Republican legislatures across the region are readying for another round of extreme partisan gerrymandering. In Georgia, which has surpassed North Carolina as the standard-bearer in the war of democracy in the South, Republicans passed a bill that would make it exceedingly feasible for state GOPers to overturn free and fair elections. According to state Senator Wiley Nickel, North Carolina may pass an even more egregious law should Republicans regain their supermajorities in November of this year. This, of course, is entirely believable.
Does all this sound partisan? I would not quarrel with that charge. The South has never fully accepted party competition; from seven decades of the Solid Democratic South to region-wide attempts to neuter the post-Civil Rights Dems, Southern conservative elites have tried to impose one-party rule by the party of white people. Today, it is the Republicans who pose a dire threat to the dream of democracy in a region where that dream has long been deferred. One-party rule by white people only: that is what we risk seeing take root in our region unless drastic action is taken by Congress.
Jones is an original contributor to PoliticsNC.