July 14, 2006
Bo Callaway, Etc. Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 05:00 PM EST I’m hardly surprised that Mr. Gordon mocked my support for reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act. I’m even less surprised that he misrepresented the substance of my comments. It’s becoming something of a routine.
Mr. Gordon writes: “Mr. Zeitz—giving ample evidence of why so many Southerners think ‘damn Yankee’ is one word—assumes, assumes, on no evidence whatever, that they might well be still a pack of racists kept in check only by the federal government. . . . In other words, don’t judge them by their present behavior, judge them by their behavior of 40 years ago.”
Actually, I refer Mr. Gordon to my post yesterday (“Poll Tax Revisited”), in which I detailed the Georgia state government’s attempt in 2005 to re-impose the poll tax, under the guise of a state photo-identification law. The proposed law would have forced all prospective voters to pay a fee of no less than $20 in order to vote, plus costs associated with travel and lost work time in the service of procuring the mandatory identification cards. So I’m absolutely not judging Georgia’s legislature or governor on actions taken 40 years ago. I’m judging them on their actions of about 12 to 18 months ago. In the reality-based world to which I belong, the above information would be considered “evidence.”
Fixing our gaze a little farther south and west, I also chronicled attempts by an all-white board of aldermen in Kilmichael, Mississippi, to cancel a municipal election, three weeks before scheduled balloting, because it became clear that a slate of African-American candidates was poised to win control of the city government. That wasn’t 40 years ago. It was five years ago. That’s also what we residents of the reality-based world call “evidence.”
I also went out of the way to emphasize that some Northern and Western municipal and state governments are guilty of similar nonsense and should be, or should continue to be, considered under the auspices of the VRA. Especially as our citizenry grows more diverse with the naturalization of millions of legal immigrants, we will need the VRA—including its pre-clearance provisions—in many places that its original authors probably never anticipated.
If I recall correctly, certain counties in New York have at certain times fallen under the VRA’s provisions. When the New Jersey Republican party used off-duty police officers to suppress the vote in predominately black wards during the 1981 gubernatorial election, it invited scrutiny from the Justice Department, which acted on the authority of the VRA. So call me a “damn Yankee” if you must, but it doesn’t change my previous acknowledgment that this is a national, and not just regional, problem.
Mr. Gordon writes, “The Republicans who are fighting for revisions want the states to be judged on their recent electoral behavior, not on their behavior in a different era. That seems reasonable to me.” Indeed they are. And by that standard, they have failed. See the above evidence.
Mr. Gordon continues, “If someone had robbed a bank, I imagine that Mr. Zeitz would argue that his voting rights should be restored just as soon as he finished his sentence, not four decades later. But cut the state of Georgia the same slack? Not a chance.” Well, yes, I do support allowing ex-felons to vote, though only after they’ve completed parole. And this is exactly what the VRA does with offending jurisdictions. There is an escape clause in the VRA that allows counties to be released from pre-clearance requirements if they meet the VRA’s standards for a certain period of time. Several counties have already done this successfully. If conservative Republicans in Georgia want to be released from the VRA’s pre-clearance requirements, all they need to is stop passing poll-tax legislation and similar devices aimed at suppressing the votes of certain citizens.
Finally, Mr. Gordon claims I have misinterpreted Lester Maddox’s election to the Georgia governor’s office in 1966 as a sign of popular support for segregation. He reminds readers that Maddox actually out-polled his GOP opponent, Rep. Bo Callaway, by a slim margin, but since Callaway’s vote total fell below the 50 percent mark, Georgia’s arcane laws threw the election to the state legislature, which tapped Maddox as governor.
What Mr. Gordon conveniently fails to tell readers (because, when the facts don’t suit his argument, he either ignores them or writes off the source as “L-I-B-E-R-A-L”) is that Callaway and Maddox were both hard-line segregationists. During his brief tenure in the U.S. House, Callaway surprised political observers by veering further to the right on race and other social issues that the rest of the state’s very conservative congressional delegation.
One of Maddox’s aides later said that the only distinction between the two candidates was tenor and tone. They shared the same ideas about race and the same resistance to civil rights legislation, but Callaway “presented these views in a vocabulary of couched euphoniums and respectable synonyms.” Rep. Charles Weltner, who served in the U.S. House with Callaway, went even further, explaining that “Callaway is the same as Maddox on race, except in a slicker way. He used code names such as ‘property rights,’ which means ‘we ain’t gonna serve no niggers.’”
So the 1966 Georgia gubernatorial election should be read as an overwhelming endorsement of segregation and a stunning rejection of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
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