Fifty years is a long time. It was fifty-three years from the Sopwith Camel to the Boeing 747.
I'm watching "Selma", the movie about the civil rights marches of 1965. The marchers were protesting systematic barriers to voting registration for black voters. It is a good movie, telling an important story.
And I'm thinking about North Carolina's voter law HB 589, which was overturned by a Federal Court in 2016, fifty-one years after Selma.
The North Carolina legislature used state records to identify black voters in North Carolina and designed the law to exclude them.
The Federal Court decision called HB 589 "the most restrictive voting law North Carolina has seen since the era of Jim Crow", and that the law was passed with “racially discriminatory intent” to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”
Fifty years is a long time.
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References:
I'm watching "Selma", the movie about the civil rights marches of 1965. The marchers were protesting systematic barriers to voting registration for black voters. It is a good movie, telling an important story.
And I'm thinking about North Carolina's voter law HB 589, which was overturned by a Federal Court in 2016, fifty-one years after Selma.
The North Carolina legislature used state records to identify black voters in North Carolina and designed the law to exclude them.
The Federal Court decision called HB 589 "the most restrictive voting law North Carolina has seen since the era of Jim Crow", and that the law was passed with “racially discriminatory intent” to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”
Fifty years is a long time.
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References:
