Page 21 - Fifteenth Amendment News Today

Why ‘Karens’ Are a Threat to Racial Progress From Ida B. Wells to Emmett Till to the ‘Karens’ of today, the trope of white women in danger has been used to harm Black people. I have white women in my life whom I like and love but, for some white women, a predatory element lingers just under the surface of their smiling faces. Because in many ways, white womanhood is the secret weapon in the perpetuation of white supremacy: When a white woman feels “unsafe”—par...

Robert E. Lee monument, Richmond, Virginia, 2020. Photograph by Joseph. Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0). Criticism of the Lost Cause and Confederate symbols stretched back as early as 1870, when Frederick Douglass called out the “ nauseating flatteries of the late Robert E. Lee” that poured in after the Confederate general’s death, asking, “Is it not about time that this bombastic laudation of the rebel chief should cease?” Until his death in 1895, Douglass engaged in an uphill battle to dis...

My Turn: Denying the Revolution mactrunk Published: 4/12/2021 4:08:25 PM The new Georgia law placing restrictions on voting has predictably — and justifiably — generated a great deal of moral outrage across the nation. The law limits early voting, and increases the power of the Republican legislature to interfere in locally run elections. These measures are based on the totally unsupported theory that the 2020 election witnessed significant voter fraud. The bizarre provision of the Georgi...

To the editor: Any informed reflection on our nation’s past reveals that the “good old days” weren’t so good for all of those who call themselves Americans. Any such reflection clearly reveals an ever present campaign to consciously marginalize targeted groups of Americans in order to ensure the economic advantage of others. Empirical evidence to support the existence and magnitude of this chronic social malignancy abounds, yet many Americans prefer to believe that they are completely �...

April 6, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET Black voters waiting to get into the Haywood County Courthouse in Tennessee to register to vote in 1960. Credit...Walter Sanders/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images The laws that disenfranchised Black Americans in the South and established Jim Crow did not actually say they were disenfranchising Black Americans and creating a one-party racist state. I raise this because of a debate among politicians and partisans on whether Georgia’s new election la...

Pennsylvania once led in suppressing the Black vote | Opinion Updated 9:45 AM; Who said Jim Crow is dead? After losing the presidential contest and two Senate races in quick succession, the Republican-controlled Georgia legislature passed a comprehensive bill to suppress the very voters— Black voters—who defeated them. In CNN’s summary: “The new law imposes new voter identification requirements for absentee ballots, empowers state officials to take over local elections boards, limits t...

Prior to the American Civil War (1861–1865), Virginia’s most influential political leaders had been reluctant to accept universal white male suffrage during the decades when it was more eagerly welcomed elsewhere in the United States. The state’s Constitutional Convention of 1829–1830 debated but declined to adopt a proposal that ownership of land no longer be a prerequisite for voting rights, continuing restriction of the electorate to one class of adult white men. The Constitutional ...

Fox News is repeatedly lying about H.R. 1 and S. 1, the For the People Act, which recently passed in the House of Representatives and now is before the Senate. Most of the falsehoods pushed by Fox are recycled from past right-wing voter suppression efforts, but challenges to the constitutionality of the bill are a new twist. However, the false claims that the For the People Act is unconstitutional because it asserts federal control over the states are an ahistorical “caricature of an argumen...

Vilification of Manu: A time travel to denounce women’s subjugation (Part 2) March 8, 2021, 1:35 PM IST Dr. Subhradipta Sarkar is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. An LL.B. from the University of Calcutta, he holds LL.M., M.Phil. & Ph.D. degrees from NLSIU, Bengaluru. He started his professional career as a Law Researcher at People’s Watch, a Madurai based human rights organization, before venturing into academics. Dr. Sarka...

An African-American family in Southern Mississippi in 1895.Credit...Sepia Times/Universal Images Group, via Getty Images This is the story of how a bill to save the vote and preserve a semblance of democracy for millions of Americans died at the hands of an intransigent, reactionary minority in the Senate, which used the filibuster to do its dirty work. In the summer of 1890, the state of Mississippi held its second constitutional convention of the post-Civil War era. The first, in 1868, was an...