It’s not often that people return to the scene of betrayal. Fifty-two years ago, in 1964, the leaders of the Democratic Party broke their own rules—at their president’s insistence. Lyndon Johnson, fearful of losing white southern votes, decided to keep the all-white Mississippi delegation in its seats at the Democrats’ national convention in Atlantic City.
Those who challenged the Jim Crow delegation, the interracial “Mississippi Freedom Democrats,” struggled to make sense of it all. Hadn’t they done everything right between 1961-64? Hadn’t they followed all the Democratic Party rules to a tee, so that they could be seated at the convention? “Over their four-year campaign, at least eight citizens had been murdered, and thousands beaten, simply for their legal pursuit of the most basic of American rights—one person, one vote.”
President Johnson intensified the betrayal by acting shocked that the Mississippi Freedom Democrats rejected his “two-seats” offer. “They pissed on us and called it rain,” one civil rights activist recalled fifty years later. The bitter reality the Freedom Democrats faced upon their return to Mississippi was that they were “crowned in powerlessness”—facing “evictions of striking cotton pickers and old people freezing to death under damp flour-sack sheets,” the Klan still riding in celebration of the haunting deaths of the three young civil rights workers killed earlier in the summer—Chaney, Schwerner, Goodman.
The lesson that the Mississippi Freedom Democrats learned in 1964 was that, for some, there was no room in the nation’s Democratic Party. The establishment was welcome, and so were all those who conformed to their rules and their understandings of “proper” politics. This included middle class African American professionals as well as workers organized in mainstream unions. It explicitly did not include sharecroppers, maids, laborers, or day workers. Sure, those disenfranchised or at the margins could still be recipients of paternalistic hand-outs. But they were not tolerated as equal participants at the decision-making table.
Since the days and years of this formative challenge and reprisal, blithely known as “the 1960s,” the Democrats and Republicans have both narrowed who counts in the nation’s credo of “We the People.” The Voting Rights Act forced open some doors for some people to get to the polls. Then gerrymandering, the vote in Florida in 2000, the decimation of the Volker Rule, Citizens United, and Shelby v. Holder whittled down “who counts” ever further. This narrowing means that what we associate with “politics” today is astonishingly limited and elite. It has deviated from any kind of popular democratic tradition. The indicators are clear that politics doesn’t serve the majority of the people. Whether looking at state politics, federal politics, EU politics, UN politics, or IMF/World Bank politics, it doesn’t make any difference. People’s everyday experience includes massive loss of meaningful, living wage jobs. Growing inequality. Banks that levy huge interest rates for college or small-business loans. Environmental degradation. There are many ways to explain the concurrent surge of Trump, Brexit, Sanders. At this point it is safe to say all three are all fed by popular alienation. Everyday people know they know they aren’t at the decision-making table. They are further enraged when those same elected politicians claim to represent them, then “piss on them and call it rain.” Many decide if they can’t be at the table, they’re prepared to knock its %&#@ legs off. Come what may.
And yet, those who think the Trump Era is one step too far consider the Democrats, Republicans, World Bank, and UN to be the only realistic thing out there. Using what passes for world-weary sophistication, they miss this fundamental narrowing of “who gets to decide,” and read the current era’s political dynamics as a function of too much democracy.
Last month, on June 18, Mississippi Freedom Democrat organizer Bob Moses returned to address the very Democratic Party that scorned and upbraided him five decades ago. In a ten-minute testimony before the Democratic Party platform committee, he challenged the Dems to take a “revolutionary stance”– Uphold the right to vote, without restriction.
Moses stands for a different vision of politics from either the Trump Era trend, or those embodying the status quo. He represents a tradition in danger of being lost and buried for another generation. It is a politics that involves the people it claims to govern. Moses is thus not some quaint left-over figure from the past. His idea of politics represents our best hope for the future.
Plenty of people might challenge the idea that the right to vote is revolutionary. And no one, least of all Moses, claims it is sufficient. Yet Moses has slogged through the trenches for over a half century, consistently standing at the side of those with the least power in the nation. At 81 years of age, Moses has seen his share of what happens when people don’t have a seat at the table. He’s witnessed up close and personal the decrepit nature of civic institutions–inadequate schools, exclusion from the information economy, and the human toll of mass incarceration. He flayed open the Democratic Party two weeks ago, calling those within it the “authors of all three devastations” to visit African Americans: a slavery-encrusted Constitution between 1787-1862, Jim Crow’s “slavery by another name” between 1875-1941, and mass incarceration in our own era.
Yes, Moses was greeted by the Platform Committee as some kind of “movement royalty.” But all the respect, even deference, concealed a larger, and more important, reality. Movement politics and small “d” democratic participation of people are largely alien concepts by now. There is neither experiential context nor accepted theoretical value to serious democratic politics–much less to a bottom-up politics. Even those among our political elites who self-identify as the most progressive members of the Democratic Party (Barbara Lee, Elijah Cummings, Cornel West) do not know how to build political power for the Democratic Party based on organizing everyday people. They, like the rest of us, swim largely in a sea of plutocratic states organized around money, or surveillance states rooted in military power. A possible third way—to build political power upon “organized people”—seems like a foreign language. Members of the committee struggled to hang with Moses as he invoked the concept of people having a say in their own lives, and marveled at his fluency:
Barbara Lee: As a progressive Democrat who embraces many of our movements on the outside—the Black Lives Matter, the Dreamers movements … how do we make sure that our Party embraces these movements and make sure we are held accountable to these justice movements and to what we have to do to become a country worthy of …the democracy movements that we all embrace?
Moses: The Party could engage with the people who are…trying to start a movement. …You need the voices of the people who are actually doing that work at the table.
In 2016, perhaps even more than in 1964, the Democrats simply know very little how to build a democracy based on the will of the people.[1]
Moses possesses a kind of democratic patience to work with people at the bottom, immune to the flattery of those who fawn over him as a movement legend. Or those who scorn him as a socialist. Or those who see his analysis as tired and out of touch. He continues on, doing the “walk of the trees.” The phrase comes from Toni Morrison, who in a July 4, 1976 article, talked about “healers and builders” who have “always worked quietly among African Americans, unlike the heroes of old,” or “the blacks who had accumulated wealth for its own sake, fame, medals or some public acknowledgment of success.” Morrison held up her grandmother Ardelia Willis as such a leader: who with an “exercise of the will” opened access to opportunity and education for her children. Willis felt that “obstacles were just that and not fixed stars.” She represented “the people whose work is real and pointed and clear in its application to the race,” people who “refuse to imitate, to compromise, and who are indifferent to public accolade. Whose work is free or priceless. They take huge risks economically and personally.” Not always popular, but always respected, they become the “unmistakable natural aristocrats of the race.” And such people keep an eye out for the signs of irrevocable and permanent change, like “the slow walk of certain species of trees from the flatlands up into the mountains.”[2]
Moses recounted that he learned the slow walk of the trees from movement elder Ella Baker. She showed him three things: First, “It’s a long, long walk. You have to learn it, but you can carve out a life in this country in struggle.” Second, “your struggle should be radical, it should go to the root of some problem, and it should work with the people who are at the bottom.” And three, you don’t sacrifice family on the walk, but you carve out, as you go, your family.”[3] Ella Baker was SNCC’s fundi, he noted, a Swahili term with no English equivalent. More than an expert, a fundi is a person from the community “who masters a given craft” by learning within the community, “coming up through the community,” helped along by others who have mastered it. This person plies their craft, teaches it to others in the community, and goes on like that, without the role “ever being institutionalized.” Baker “mastered certain things as she grew up and became part of the movement,” Moses finished. “And she’s taught us those things and there is no institutionalization of those things” he noted in 1978.[4] Since then, SNCC people have continued to work in the light of Miss Baker, as fundi within communities across the world.
Moses, on June 18, served as fundi for the nation. He has long chosen to bypass the charismatic rhetorical toolkit of MLK or Obama—Ella Baker warned him that it might mobilize people for a moment, but unless it was harnessed to developing everyday people as leaders, it wouldn’t bring them into a deeper sense of their own civic power. Often his public talks are delivered in an even, quiet tone. Yet last week, sitting square and tall in the convention center room, he channeled the power of the ancestors. David Walker, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Ella Baker. In riveting testimony before the Democratic National Convention’s platform committee, he spoke on behalf of the SNCC Legacy Project. “We ask that the National Democratic Party take a revolutionary stance: Confirm the right to vote and make it explicit; adopt in your platform the following statement: [bold in the original]
The National Democratic Party agrees to work for the following Voting Rights Resolution.
Section 1: The People’s right of representation being necessary to our republican form of government, the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be infringed.
Section 2: The Federal branches of government shall protect this right.[5]
In 1964, national Democrats asked why is SNCC was taking “illiterates down to vote?” Today, Moses proposed, they might ask “why is SNCC taking convicted felons down to register to vote?” It’s a question rooted in arguments about the meaning of the same “two letter word” that broke the nation apart at the dawn of the Civil War. Who are “we” in the Constitution’s “We the People”?
For Moses and SNCC, the answer has stayed consistent over the last five decades: “we” are all, each of us, the people. Make a little room in the circle, they say. Abiding by the basic civic faith that people, just plain people, should run the society they live in. And it starts with the right to vote. Which shall not be infringed. Period, full stop. That each of the federal branches of government protect that right. Still, after all these years, a radical plank for either the Democratic or the Republican Party.
Some might ask if the plank is, in fact, radical. What about undocumented people? Why didn’t the plank explicitly include felons? SNCC’s language choice is interesting here. They affirm the broadest possible “we.” Not we the “citizens.” But we the “people.” Whoever it is that “we,” in the nation, decide who “we” are. In fifty or a hundred years, Moses and SNCC cannot possibly foresee where the challenges will lie, and they want the default to be the broad “we.” That is where the Constitution situates the ultimate power—not in a king, not in a god, not in a bloodline. It’s an understanding of bottom-up power that is beyond the lived experience most of us have had. So whether we ask about felon voting rights, the undocumented, people younger than 18—it does not matter. The broadest access to the vote is affirmed here. It makes restricting the vote a problem to be waged in court. It makes restricting the vote the costly, time-consuming endeavor. It’s radical because it goes to the root. Who, in “we” the people, is going to count?
There are of course millions of Americans who don’t experience any voting problems whatsoever. Regardless of race, they find it easy to register, there are no lines when they go to vote, and the poll workers whisk them through to the voting booth. The shell game that Republicans have played to restrict voting since 2000 has taken place mostly in the “Purple” states—Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina. To take the latter, in 2008 North Carolina voted for Obama by a wisp of a margin, 14,000 votes. In 2012, the state went back to the Republicans. Into this purple-state swirl waded the Supreme Court. In 2013, in a 5-4 split, the Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder decided that the Voting Rights Act’s (VRA) pre-clearance formula was “based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day.” The Court’s majority wrote that things “have changed dramatically” and “the tests and devices that blocked ballot access have been forbidden nationwide for over 40 years.” They declared the VRA coverage formula unconstitutional.
The Court’s understanding that 2013 was dramatically different from 1965 turned out to be naïve at best. For Moses’ part, he simply noted that with the Shelby decision, Chief Justice Roberts “elevated a Confederate Narrative of states’ rights over a People’s Narrative of universal citizenship, providing a judicial façade for the contemporary ‘will to white supremacy.’” Since Shelby, ten of the fifteen states previously covered by the VRA’s “pre-clearance” introduced new legislation which makes it harder to cast a ballot. The laws disproportionately affect voters of color. It is true that a higher percentage of African Americans voted than whites in 2012, the first time in the nation’s history where that has been the case—in North Carolina and across the nation. Then came Shelby v. Holder. 70% of African American voters in North Carolina cast a ballot during “early voting” until, emboldened by Shelby, the legislature struck it down in 2014. Getting rid of early voting days reduced turnout–lower income voters often have to schedule around work and family commitments, which early voting allowed. Now that is gone, and it disproportionately impacts people of color. Fewer people of color who tried to vote were allowed to vote in 2014, and the same will be the case in 2016. As Howard Zinn quipped years ago, “If voting changed anything, it would be illegal.” North Carolina’s Republican state legislature fears its oncoming majority, and is therefore trying like hell to restrict who gets to the polls.
Challenging such “New Jim Crow” laws is more complicated than the VRA’s pre-clearance process. Voting rights litigation in North Carolina and Texas alone involves over one hundred lawyers and runs into millions of dollars. Should people have to pay millions in legal fees to assert their right to vote? This runs counter to basic American values and also debases the sacrifices made by James Chaney and hundreds of others like him who, outside the national spotlight, put their lives on the line to secure the ballot.
Universal access to voting. Would it really change anything? Plenty of people who want more democracy have serious doubts. Direct action, marches, economic boycotts, and Monkey Wrench Gangs remain important tools in addition to voting. Yet the reason voting remains a central, if not sole, part of a radical democratic strategy is simple. As the young people who are part of the Moral Monday movement in North Carolina point out, voting rights are at the core of the fight here for a non-partisan, progressive agenda. As members of the Youth and College Division of the state’s NAACP, they point out that turnout for registered youth age 18-25 hit a record high in 2008 for North Carolina – 60% of registered youth cast ballots, and that made the difference when the margin of victory (14,000 votes) was so narrow. If 60% of millennials voting could change a whole state from Red to Blue, they note, “Imagine what us voting consistently could do.”
Here in North Carolina, these millennials have made visible a fresh analysis: the chances of electing a representative at the local, state or federal level who shares the priorities young people in North Carolina care about—like affordable higher public education, a living wage, police accountability, and environmental justice—increases with each election that the youth voter turnout increases. In 2016, they might only have a 3 in 10 chance of electing a person who shares their priorities. But if youth turnout continues to grow, candidates will have to address these priorities. In 2018 and 2020, with a 70% youth turnout, they predict the likelihood of a candidate who shares at least half of their top priorities increases to 5 in 10. It’s an analysis that builds citizens for the long-haul. Their priorities are simply likely to be met, over time, if they vote.
Voting is not the only tool a democracy needs. Education, civic institutions that train everyday people to be leaders, getting money out of politics, and other initiatives are clearly vital. Yet regardless of political sympathies or strategic analysis, Americans of all ages, genders, races, and experiences need to be able to trust the basic legitimacy of the political system fought for over two centuries by ordinary citizens. All these years later, that trust cannot be sustained without enshrining “one person, one vote” as a bedrock practice. The ball’s in the court of the major political parties again, Moses challenged the Democrats. Will the Democrats betray the very people and Constitution they claim to represent?
Stay tuned.
Notes
[1] This lack of tools was painfully obvious when Moses’ long-time colleague from the 1960s, John Lewis, Congressman from Georgia, held a sit-in on the floor (a tool dating to 1960) of the house last month to force Congress to vote on gun control legislation.
[2] Toni Morrison, “A Slow Walk of Trees,” New York Times, 4 July 1976, 104.
[3] Bob Moses, SNCC 40th Anniversary Conference, Tape 12, Rubenstein Library, Duke University, Durham, NC.
[4] Bob Moses, “Address at 75th Birthday Celebration for Ella Jo Baker, December 9, 1978, Carnegie International Center, New York, NY,” Transcription by Clayborne Carson, Folder 1, Box 10, Joseph Sinsheimer Papers, Rubenstein Library, Duke University, Durham, NC.
[5] For the full transcript, see http://www.crmvet.org/comm/1606_slp_moses.pdf
Wesley Hogan is Director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.