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Voting has a violent history in the U.S. There's a reason we're talking about it so openly now. (648 hits)


Voting has a violent history in the U.S. There's a reason we're talking about it so openly now.

It's been relatively easy for white Americans to ignore the long history of violence aimed at Black voters. This year, they're experiencing it firsthand.

By Marc Ambinder

If you read the news these days, there's a good chance you'll see that sociologists believe the United States is on the verge of sustained political violence, that our democracy is on a knife's edge, that voters openly fear a race war and that Facebook is adopting its tools for "at-risk" countries to head off post-election chaos in the U.S. When I get messages from friends asking me whether they should retweet the threat of Election Day violence by a leader of the Oath Keepers militia — after it was broadcast to millions on Alex Jones' radio show — my mind hovers uneasily between two thoughts: The first one is that we are about to have an election in which the threat of violence is real and spreading. I can't remember an election when anything outside of sporadic disorder felt possible.

And then sense and history kick in: Political violence, most especially to prevent Black people and other minorities from voting and attaining power, has been a feature of American elections since our country's founding. In the 20th century, white supremacists kindled ethnic resentment and sought to delegitimize a pluralistic democracy. As MSNBC's Chris Hayes has pointed out, referring to the post-World War II Jim Crow South, stationing armed men at polling places was a "key feature of that movement."

One hundred years ago, in 1920, Black residents of Orange County, Florida, spent the summer braving deep, humid swamps to register hundreds of new voters in the county. They conspired with sympathetic white Republicans, who wanted those votes. Black people had been almost completely politically disenfranchised — re-disenfranchised — for decades in central Florida, with the exception of Eatonville, a small town in the center of the county. Orlando was the county seat, and its police chief was a white supremacist, who according to history feared the power of the Black franchise.

On Election Day, when several Black men in Ocoee, a city in the northern part of the county, wouldn't leave polling sites as ordered, a group of white men, helped by the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, tracked them down. Having twice been turned away from the polls, one Black man, Mose Norman, returned to his precinct with a gun. The white gang reportedly used the specter of armed Black men as a pretext. Some historians call the following events a "race riot," but that euphemizes what happened: A throng of white men proceeded to massacre as many as 50 Black people. There is no record of the exact number of people killed, because no one was ever convicted of the killings. When it comes to elections, this massacre and similar events remain open wounds throughout the country.

I grew up around the same area in central Florida, and I had no idea this had happened until I began researching state-sanctioned violence against Black people. It certainly wasn't taught in local schools. (Only as of this year was it included in the public school history curriculum.) There's a new conversation that's been sparked in 2020 about violence — racial violence, and also election violence. Reportedly 3 in 4 voters expect this Election Day to be violent. A key difference is that this year, more white people fear being violently deterred from exercising their constitutional right to vote, and for most white people, they're experiencing this type of fear for the first time. This in itself is a significant fact — that we are talking about election violence more because of who is being affected by it — and it says nearly everything you need to know about racial inequality in America.

READ MORE: Voting has a violent history in the U.S. There's a reason we're talking about it so openly now. https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/voting-has-v...
Posted By: Dea. Ron Gray Sr.
Friday, October 30th 2020 at 6:14PM
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Also, none of this is abstract. It's happened in American history. Armed men at polling places were a key feature of the movement of terroristic violencethat murdered multi-racial democracy in the south and replaced it with a one-party apartheid authoritarian regime. ---- Chris Hayes


Friday, October 30th 2020 at 7:54PM
Dea. Ron Gray Sr.
How correct you are Deacon Gray. If our votes were inconsequential, they wouldn't be fighting so hard to suppress it, to the point again of murder.
Friday, October 30th 2020 at 8:04PM
Reginald Goodwin
You got the idea Brother Goodwin.


Friday, October 30th 2020 at 8:19PM
Dea. Ron Gray Sr.
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