by Joy-Ann Reid
The president’s defenders pointed to Valerie Jarrett’s status as the president’s closest and most powerful adviser, and her careful consideration of issues facing black institutions. Civil rights leaders pointed to Anthony Foxx, the former Charlotte mayor appointed as transportation secretary; Mel Watt, the former congressman from North Carolina whom Obama tapped to head the Federal Housing Finance Agency , whose appointments were partly credited to Representative Fudge’s prodding; and the three nominees the president would announce in June, to fill vacancies on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which reviews most federal regulations, including those impacting the Affordable Care Act.
In October, Jeh Johnson would be nominated to lead the Department of Homeland Security, making the face of the country’s federal law enforcement apparatus—from the attorney general to counterterrorism, to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, headed by B. Todd Jones—the face of black men. The president would tap a rising Latino political star, Julián Castro of Texas, to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and fill the open seat at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which had been the brainchild of newly elected Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, with Richard Cordray, a favorite of civil rights leaders.
The president bristled at suggestions that he didn’t care enough, or do enough, for African Americans, members of his team said. From the administration’s point of view, Obama was providing both a living example of progress, and tangible access to it, from the health-care law, to education fixes to shore up black students and better prepare them to go to college, to an improving economy that was directly alleviating suffering.
In public forums, and in private discussions with African American members of the media in particular, administration officials like Valerie Jarrett and Anton Gunn, the deputy state director of Obama’s 2008 campaign in South Carolina, who went on to lead the external affairs office at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, stressed continually that if Republican governors and legislatures across the South had not rejected the health-care law’s expansion of Medicaid, nearly 5 million more Americans would have had access to insurance that would enable them to afford to see a doctor. Half of them were black and Hispanic, and the remainder were among the white working poor.
Obama was presiding over a country that was as politically and racially polarized as it had been in decades. Or perhaps simply more overtly so. And while Democrats blamed the far-right tea party and its growing stranglehold on the GOP, conservatives just as vehemently blamed the president and his administration for stoking, rather than alleviating, the racial divide.
In August 2013, conservative writer Ross Douthat, in a New York Times blog post, said Democrats had “embraced and furthered the trend” toward “racial polarization of the parties.” He accused the Obama campaign team of abandoning the Clinton-era strategy of wooing anti-abortion, pro-coal, working-class whites who were skeptical on matters of immigration and hawkish on matters of crime. He said the campaign had alienated swing voters who once made the notion of a North Dakota, West Virginia, or Arkansas Democrat possible. Douthat and other conservatives laid the blame squarely at the White House door, for pushing away religious, blue-collar white voters through their pursuit of marriage equality, abortion rights, gun control, and the secularist marginalization of God.
While Obama in 2008 had slightly improved upon previous Democratic presidential candidates’ performance with white voters, in 2012 his reelection was attended by a near collapse of white support for him and his party, particularly in the South. The turn among white voters had begun during the first months of Obama’s presidency and it had been swift and sharp, resulting in a steep decline in the president’s approval ratings in 2009. By 2010, researchers at Brown University and the University of California, Los Angeles had determined that attachment to the two political parties was becoming “increasingly polarized by both racial attitudes and race, as a result of Obama’s rise to prominence within the Democratic Party,” and that the most resentful white voters had fled the fastest and most furtively toward the GOP.
Despite a tendency toward conciliation that some of his liberal supporters found maddening, and a studious avoidance of race-centered conflict, President Obama had been unable to prevent the relentless narrative tide on the right, which stoked deep-seated opposition to everything from the health-care law to immigration reform, primed by a broad discomfort, particularly among older Americans, with the sweeping demographic changes overtaking the country, whose white majority was shrinking with every presidential election.
For many Americans, their country was being forcibly changed, whether by a perceived “invasion” of “illegal” migrants pouring across the southern border, through a corrupted voting system that was robbing Republican candidates of their rightful victories, or by an “imperial” president who was ignoring the will of congressional Republicans and thus the “true” will of the American people. Obama was the exotically named, racially mixed cipher for their deepest fears. Also, his occasional digressions from the constant reminders—required of every American politician, including any politician of color who sought broad support—of the country’s inherent goodness and progress and exceptionalism made him an enemy.
Stoked by conservative media, aggrieved Americans found evidence of the president’s alleged infidelity to defending the lives of its citizens in such tragedies as the failed, Bush-era anti-gunrunning program code-named “Fast and Furious,” in which a U.S. Border Patrol agent died, and the terrorist raid on two American diplomatic and intelligence compounds in Benghazi, Libya, in September 2012, in which four Americans were killed, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens. They agitated for investigations of the IRS’s reviews of tea party and liberal organizations seeking tax-exempt status, and encouraged the never-ending scrutiny of Obama’s birth certificate.
If the 2010 election, which handed swing states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin over to Republicans in a census year, was the first blow by the Right against the coalition that placed Obama in the White House, the second came on June 25, 2013. On that day the Supreme Court’s five-member conservative majority ruled in the case of Shelby County v. Holder that Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965—which provided the formula for determining which geographical areas must have their voting laws reviewed by the federal government or federal courts—was unconstitutional, and remanded to a hopelessly gridlocked Congress the job of updating it. Justice Clarence Thomas, filing a separate, concurring opinion, stated that he would have struck down any requirement to preclear state voting laws.
“Our country has changed,” a triumphal Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in the majority decision, citing the large black voter turnout in the recent presidential elections in which Barack Obama was on the ballot, swelling the ranks of black participation. He wrote specifically about the southern states that once were home to the most trenchant resistance to black registration, as proof that federal oversight of those states was arcane, unfair, and no longer necessary. History, Roberts wrote, “did not end in 1965.”
Opponents of the ruling cried that history didn’t begin in 2008, either.
The decision ripped the heart out of the 1965 law, passed in the wake of “Bloody Sunday” during Dr. King’s Selma marches, to patch the holes in the Civil Rights Act, which, for all its breadth in sweeping aside impediments to black daily life, had failed to address the ongoing barriers for blacks at southern voting booths.
Legal experts said the decision was a brazen renunciation of judicial restraint and a bold move to free the former Jim Crow states from federal scrutiny, and would be felt all over the country. Civil rights groups also noted that when Roberts was a deputy solicitor general in the Reagan administration, he opposed strengthening the Voting Rights and Fair Housing acts and “urged undoing policies aimed at achieving racial diversity in employment, education, and broadcasti
ng through affirmative action,” while casting doubt on the right to privacy for women seeking abortions and referring to the “the purported gender gap.”
In dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg cited current barriers to voting access, including gerrymandering that still remained heavily freighted by race. Ginsburg proclaimed that the majority’s decision was full of “hubris” in ignoring Congress, which had renewed the Voting Rights Act as recently as 2006, and said they had relied simply “on increases in voter registration and turnout as if that were the whole story.
“Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet,” Ginsburg’s dissent continued. “The sad irony of today’s decision lies in its utter failure to grasp why the VRA has proven effective. . . . The Court appears to believe that the VRA’s success in eliminating the specific devices extant in 1965 means that preclearance is no longer needed. . . . With that belief, and the argument derived from it, history repeats itself.”
Indeed, within two hours of the court’s decision, Greg Abbott, the Texas attorney general, announced that his state would immediately implement a voter ID law that a federal court had previously prevented. In turn, the attorney general of Alabama, where the Shelby County litigation began, put in place a law that required proof of citizenship in the form of a birth certificate or passport to legally vote.
Within forty-eight hours, six of the nine states once covered by preclearance, all in the heart of the South, had tightened their voting laws. For voters in Mississippi, Arkansas, South Carolina, Texas, Alabama, and Virginia, the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision would be felt as early as the next election.
Within weeks, North Carolina enacted the most tight-fisted law of them all: It shortened the time for early voting, tightened restrictions on acceptable identification—for example, ID from the state’s colleges was insufficient to vote—ended same-day voter registration and preregistration of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds in the state’s public schools, forbade provisional ballots for anyone who goes to the wrong precinct, and barred county clerks from extending voting hours, even in cases of emergency. Protests broke out at the state capitol—dubbed “Moral Mondays” by Rev. William Barber, the head of the North Carolina NAACP—compounded by the governor’s refusal to expand Medicaid under the national health-care law.
Even states that had been beyond the reach of the Voting Rights Act, since they had not previously been required to preclear their election laws, moved to take advantage of the ruling, eliminating same-day voter registration in Wisconsin, and slashing the early voting period in Ohio.
Civil rights organizations began filing suits. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund and groups like the Advancement Project and the Lawyers Committee on Civil Rights Under Law geared up for a fresh round of legal battles, from state to federal courts. Eric Holder’s office at the Justice Department was remanded to the front lines and he announced that his Civil Rights Division was joining the lawsuits in Texas and North Carolina. Holder stated, “We will not allow the Supreme Court’s recent decision to be interpreted as open season for states to pursue measures that suppress voting rights.”
Holder had become the man conservatives hated nearly as much as the president. He had already been held in contempt of Congress for allegedly refusing to disclose Justice Department documents on Operation Fast and Furious. In the first year after the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision, the Justice Department would take the states of Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania to court. Conservatives were furious. Texas governor Rick Perry accused the Justice Department of mounting an “end-run around the Supreme Court [that] undermines the will of the people of Texas, and casts unfair aspersions on our state’s common-sense efforts to preserve the integrity of our elections process.
“Once again,” Perry said, “the Obama administration is demonstrating utter contempt for our country’s system of checks and balances, not to mention the U.S. Constitution.”
Perry was joined by Texas senator John Cornyn, who accused Holder of running a “politicized Justice Department bent on inserting itself into the sovereign affairs of Texas.” He declared, “[W]e reject the notion that the federal government knows what’s best for us.”
Greg Abbott, the state’s attorney general, doubled down on his state’s intent to “prevent illegal votes,” adding for good measure that “Eric Holder’s outrageous claim that voter ID is a racist plot to disenfranchise minority voters is gutter politics and is offensive to the overwhelming majority of Texans of all races who support this ballot integrity measure.”
On July 13, a Saturday, two weeks after the Supreme Court’s landmark decision, a Sanford, Florida, jury, which included only one nonwhite member, acquitted George Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin, touching off nationwide protests, from Times Square to Miami. The conservative media rejoiced. Zimmerman had become a cultural hero of the Right, whereas for many black Americans he had become a chilling emblem of the metastasizing power of the gun, wielded not just by police officers, but even by fellow citizens, whose deadly actions reflected the still-commonplace visceral fear of black men.
Rev. Al Sharpton, who had stood with Martin’s family and led mass protests calling for Zimmerman’s arrest, denounced the verdict as an “atrocity” and a “slap in the face to those that believe in justice in this country.”
The next day, the president released a statement that called on Americans to “respect the call for calm reflection from two parents who lost their young son,” and admonished his fellow countrymen to “ask ourselves if we’re doing all we can to widen the circle of compassion and understanding in our own communities . . . if we’re doing all we can to stem the tide of gun violence that claims too many lives across this country on a daily basis . . . and . . . as individuals and as a society, how we can prevent future tragedies like this.” He added, “That’s the way to honor Trayvon Martin.”
For many, the first president who had experienced American life in brown skin had released an overly studious missive that was devoid of personal reflection and seemed hollow and insufficient. Michelle Alexander, a law professor at Ohio State University whose book The New Jim Crow had become a bible for those engaged in the struggle against mass incarceration and the disproportionate weight of the criminal justice system on black lives, accused Obama and Holder of promoting “frank conversations about race” but showing “relatively little in terms of actual initiative and leadership . . . around issues of racial justice.” Alexander expressed her hope that “in the months that follow the Trayvon Martin tragedy, . . . we will see much more courage and bold leadership coming from the Justice Department.”
Civil rights leaders, including National Urban League president Marc Morial, challenged Obama to use this moment to arrest the economic decline in black communities, while Rev. Jesse Jackson, on CNN, urged the president to offer “moral leadership,” noting that “the heat will continue to rise.”
Even the president’s strongest supporters pleaded with him not to let the crisis pass. Sharpton publicly and privately pressed Obama to speak out, whatever the political consequences. Cornell Belcher, an African American whose polling firm aided Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns, called the verdict “an opportunity for us not to kick the can down the road again,” and “a chance for the president to get larger than the regular politics and the racial riffs would dictate . . . an opportunity to create an understanding. A lot of white America doesn’t seem to understand the hurt that’s in the African American community today.”
In a Washington Post op-ed, Janet Langhart Cohen, a black author and former television journalist who is married to Clinton-era defense secretary William Cohen, lamented Obama’s sober call for “calm reflection”: “Few expected the president to denounce the verdict or call upon people to take to the streets in protest, but we did expect him to speak in a way that touched the heartbreak, despa
ir and quiet rage that so many of us feel at this moment.”
Langhart Cohen wrote,
On multiple occasions, Obama has asked blacks to understand the high wire he is forced to walk on the subject of race. He has pleaded that we cut him some slack. Most have done so even as conditions in the black community have become more desperate. We have waited and watched the president address issues of importance to women, gays and lesbians, Latinos and the security of our allies. We praised his boldness in speaking to the issue of sexual orientation during his visit to Africa. For the past four years, we have remained silent; some have been satisfied that Obama being the first black president was reason enough to seal our lips and muffle our voices. But most were convinced that, once he entered his second term, Obama would be liberated from the racial harness that politics forced him to wear.
Citing Dr. King’s “fierce urgency of now,” and noting that white presidents, including John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, had spoken forcefully on matters of race, Langhart Cohen expressed the “hope that President Obama will speak not just to black people or just to white people but to the good people in America.” She added, “We can never have racial reconciliation without discussing the truth.”
Protests and vigils were flaring around the country. In Tallahassee, Florida, more than a dozen members of a coalition of young activists calling themselves the Dream Defenders, who had marched to Sanford in the early days of the Trayvon Martin uproar, staged a sit-in inside the governor’s office, demanding a change in the state’s Stand Your Ground gun law. Three days after the verdict, on July 16, Holder told the NAACP’s annual national convention in Orlando, less than a hundred miles from where Trayvon Martin was killed, that Martin’s death was “tragic and unnecessary.” The case “provides yet another opportunity for our nation to speak honestly—and openly—about the complicated and emotionally charged issues that this case has raised,” Holder said. He went on to declare: “It’s time to question laws that senselessly expand the concept of self-defense and sow dangerous conflict in our neighborhoods . . . [by] allowing and perhaps encouraging violent situations to escalate in public.”