-Caveat Lector- Civil-rights history and Bush: Turning back the clock? By Carla Binion President John F. Kennedy sent federal troops to help integrate all-white schools in the 1960s. President Lyndon Johnson later steered civil-rights legislation through Congress, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965 -- an act that bolstered the voting rights of African-Americans. Election 2000 has transported us back to an earlier, less progressive time. At least two recent events throw us back to a less racially-sensitive era: First, many African-American voters say they were targeted and disenfranchised during election 2000 -- that their right to vote was violated. Second, George W. Bush has nominated racially-insensitive John Ashcroft for Attorney General. (For more on Ashcroft, see Online Journal articles of 12/29/00.) However, these are not the first setbacks since the civil-rights progress of the 1960s. Here are two other examples: (1) President Ronald Reagan worked (unsuccessfully) to get Congress to eliminate a critical section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In addition, the Reagan administration supported a Seattle law that opposed student reassignment to achieve school integration. The Reagan Justice Department also argued in the Supreme Court that the IRS could not deny tax exemption to the infamous Bob Jones University -- the school that prohibits interracial dating without parental consent. (Howard Zinn, THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: A PEOPLE'S HISTORY, Harper and Row, 1980, 1984.) (2) Ira Glasser, former Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, writes that in 1989, in a series of decisions, the U. S. Supreme Court "badly undermined the ability of people with claims of discrimination to obtain relief in the courts." For example, the Court made it easier for employers to defend themselves against discrimination claims when it changed the rules of proof in employment-discrimination cases. (Ira Glasser, VISIONS OF LIBERTY, Arcade Publishing, 1991.) Glasser says that in response to the 1989 decisions, Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun stated, "One wonders whether the majority still believes that discrimination is a problem in our society, or even remembers that it ever was." In the various 1989 decisions, the Supreme Court reinterpreted, and changed the meaning, of some of the civil-rights laws of the late 1960s and the 1970s. In 1990, Congress tried to amend the civil-rights laws in order to give them back their original meaning "with language so clear that the Court could not retreat from it," says Glasser. Both houses of Congress passed the new law that strengthened civil-rights, but President George H. W. Bush vetoed it, claiming it was a "racial quota" law. Glasser says Bush's characterization was wrong -- that the law in fact prohibited quotas. During the early 1960s, thousands of African-Americans worked to register voters. On hundreds of occasions, they demonstrated peacefully but were regularly brutally beaten, tear gassed, jailed and some were killed. Historian Howard Zinn writes that in June 1964, a group of civil rights workers met near the White House to hold a public discussion about the daily violence they faced. The group pled for help from government leaders. Constitutional lawyers attending the meeting testified that the national government had the power to protect civil-rights workers against violence. However, when the group gave President Johnson a transcript of their meeting, including the lawyers' testimony, they received no reply. (Howard Zinn, A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, Harper-Perrenial Books, 1990) It took African-Americans years of peaceful protest met by violent backlash before the federal government finally stepped in on their behalf. Twelve days after the public meeting referenced above, three civil-rights workers (black Mississippian James Chaney and two white volunteers, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner) were beaten with chains and shot to death. Today, no government agency has intervened in any substantial way on behalf of African-American voters who were cleansed from Florida's voting lists in disproportionate numbers. In addition, in America today, as Ira Glasser points out, "blacks are disproportionately arrested, disproportionately imprisoned, and disproportionately executed." In some ways, slavery continues in the form of corporate-owned for-profit prisons and a racially biased justice system. A recent Washington Post article by Arthur Santana (12/18/00) said regarding the planned protests of the upcoming Bush inauguration: "Thousands of law enforcement officers from accross the region are preparing intensive security....The closest presidential race in history has produced deep tensions." The protests of the Bush inaugural will not be about a merely "close" presidential race or aimless "deep tensions." Instead, they will be about the fact that African-Americans -- who turned out to vote in record numbers, and almost exclusively for Al Gore -- have been disproportionately disenfranchised. During election 2000, many black voters complained that they were thwarted in their effort to vote. A Gregory Palast article in Salon (12/4/00) showed that a disproportionately high number of African-Americans were falsely listed as felons and purged from Florida's voting lists. The "election," as most Americans know, was not handled in a fair and ethical manner, and it is likely that the candidate who received fewer votes (both fewer popular votes and fewer electoral college votes) has been appointed president-elect by a partisan U. S. Supreme Court. To recap: Bush has been appointed president on the backs of disenfranchised black voters. After his appointment, he nominated as his attorney general the Bob Jones University honorary degree recipient, John Ashcroft. Both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, and their Supreme Court nominees, tried to reverse the civil-rights progress of the 1960s and 1970s. Early civil-rights workers' efforts could be further dismantled over the next four years unless Democrats in Congress do as Kennedy and Johnson finally did -- namely, use the power of the government to stand up for the people's civil liberties. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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