by Joy-Ann Reid
For the first time in the country’s history, African Americans voted at a higher percentage than their white counterparts. Their determination to defend the president and his legacy was just one factor in their electoral zeal. Another, and palpably so, was the cascade of voter laws that sprang up after the 2010 elections.
In the wake of that midterm triumph, Republican-controlled legislatures had unleashed a flurry of laws, some using model legislation crafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a veritable conservative bill factory. In Ohio and Florida, the Republican-led legislatures set out to decrease the period for early voting, and state legislatures in red and newly red states sought to erect stricter criteria for voting applications that in some cases invalidated the registrations of voters who had gone to the polls without incident for decades, or made it harder for students to vote in the states where they attend school or for women who had changed their surnames after marriage or divorce to vote.
The tea party movement was declining in popularity, but the Right’s core activists remained fiercely devoted to the idea that restricting access to the ballot was the way to win back the White House. Groups like True the Vote, funded through grants by the Bradley Foundation and other conservative nonprofits that were less ostentatious than the notorious Koch brothers but no less enthusiastic, paid for billboards that warned of legal consequences for “fraud” at the polls in Ohio and Wisconsin. They also dispatched volunteers to “observe” polling locations in majority-black precincts in key states nationwide. At True the Vote’s national summit in Houston in April 2012, Bill Ouren, the group’s national “elections coordinator,” said that voting under the watchful eye of the tea party–allied group should feel “like driving and seeing the police following you.”
By June 2011, ten states had enacted strict voter ID laws, including five in the South—Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and Mississippi—along with Kansas, Texas, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, and the strictest of them all, Pennsylvania, where a Republican state representative, Mike Turzai, boasted that the law would ensure a Romney win.
The Pennsylvania law was eventually struck down by a federal judge, and a spate of lawsuits filed by Eric Holder’s Justice Department and its busy Civil Rights Division slowed the rush toward nationwide voter ID laws, which civil rights organizations viewed as a slide backward toward Jim Crow. But as the 2012 election dawned, news about the efforts by the Right to enact these laws clearly aimed at making it more difficult for minorities to vote triggered a virtual stampede of black and Hispanic voters to the polls.
“I don’t think even the mainstream Democratic politicians understood how voter ID and voter suppression would be a galvanizing issue,” Marc Morial said, adding that had Republicans run this “through the lens of common sense and intuition” they might have predicted the depth and breadth of the backlash among not only black but also Hispanic voters.
Many had predicted that black voters would sit out the election out of disaffection with the economy, Obama’s failure to fulfill some campaign promises, or even his “evolution” into an official supporter of gay marriage, which some thought would sink him with black evangelicals.
Instead, despite lines that in some states stretched on for hours, 1.8 million more African Americans went to the polls than did so in 2008, while 2 million fewer white voters cast ballots. Obama lost the white vote by a catastrophic margin, but the electorate was infused with a share of black, brown, Asian, and white urban voters that was large enough to counterbalance the lowest share of white voters, at 39 percent, that any Democrat had claimed in a generation.
President Obama’s second inauguration, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, was punctuated by a call to national unity, and by cultural notes that spanned generations. There was the invocation, delivered by Myrlie Evers-Williams, widow of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers; and the administration of the vice presidential oath by the Supreme Court’s first Latina justice, Sonia Sotomayor. There was the president’s speech, which offered the first ever inclusion in an inaugural address of gay and lesbian Americans in the American pageant, and the oath of office taken on a pair of Bibles: one that had been owned by Abraham Lincoln, the other by Martin Luther King Jr. The secular hymnal of the country—from “America the Beautiful” to “The Star-Spangled Banner”—were sung by an eclectic range of voices, from James Taylor to Kelly Clarkson to Beyoncé.
AS THE PRESIDENT ENTERED HIS SECOND TERM, REPUBLICANS were more determined than ever to neutralize him by repealing his health-care law and stripping away hated policies like financial reform. Just as they had in 2010, moderate and red-state Democrats would flee from the reelected president as they focused on the 2014 midterms. Key U.S. Senate races were to be waged largely in the South, which was now hostile territory to the party that once ruled it unilaterally. The South had become the home to two political parties: one black and Democratic and the other Republican and white. Democrats on Capitol Hill, faced with the choice of validating Barack Obama, as Bill Clinton had done, or spurning him to curry favor with increasingly conservative white voters, were choosing the latter.
In February 2013, more than a dozen civil rights leaders gathered in the White House for a meeting with the president. The groups represented included the NAACP, National Action Network, National Urban League, National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, National Council of Negro Women, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, along with Washington, D.C.’s historic Nineteenth Street Baptist Church, whose pastor attended. They called for aggressive administration policies to halt black unemployment, which had declined to 13.8 percent while the nation’s total jobless rate had fallen to below 8 percent. They also wanted the president to attack disparities in the criminal justice system and education. But mostly they’d come to talk about voter ID and the other laws that challenged the belief that every American of age should have free access to the ballot.
Obama didn’t disagree about the laws’ pernicious intent. But he cautioned the group not to make voter ID the “be all and end all,” telling those assembled that “if people want to vote they can,” and “you can’t assume you can’t vote and not meet the test that’s set up by the state and then claim you’ve been disenfranchised,” one participant recalled, adding, “And there’s some truth in that.”
“There are clearly examples where he has shied away from matters of race and examples where his team overreacted, like with Shirley Sherrod, who I believe they threw under bus, but in this instance he was just trying to calibrate things,” the participant recalled. “I think depending on who heard it, it came off differently, but he was not denying the significance of the issue” of voter ID.
Still, some in the group were surprised by Obama’s comments, and not pleasantly so, having gone all out for months to fight against voter ID laws. Now the president seemed to be saying that if people want to vote badly enough they could, and that his reelection and the long lines of black and Hispanic voters around the country had demonstrated as much.
“He said we had to get over it,” another participant said, recalling that the president even mentioned polls showing broad support for voter ID laws. “I was sitting there just still kind of completely sapped of energy from crisscrossing the country firing up our people to stop voter suppression so that he could become president [again] and then we all sit down in the White House and he thanks us by telling us to get over it. . . . I was just thinking, You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
Some in the room worried that Obama, ever the pragmatist, failed to see the peril not just for his presidency but also for his most loyal constituency. Voter ID was just one weapon Republican state legislatures and governors could use against minority voters. States were also busy restricting early voting days and hours, making it harder for working-class Americans to make it to the polls before they closed, and particularly targeting the Sunday before elections, known in black churches
as “souls to the polls Sunday,” for closure in key states like Ohio and Florida.
“If you’re a senator from Illinois you can get over voter ID,” the second participant, a younger movement activist, said. “But if you’re the president of the United States, leading the Democratic Party that has been targeted by voter suppression, let alone the first black president, when blacks are being targeted, then you shouldn’t be saying ‘get over’ any aspect of voter suppression; the only thing you should be saying is ‘fight, fight, fight!’ ”
“I think he’s against it,” a third participant in the White House meeting said of the president’s views on voter ID. “I think he understands it in political terms related to his own [re]election,” that when you try to suppress voters, they turn out more. The problem, the participant said, is that many of those who work in the White House “don’t know anybody without a driver’s license.”
The meeting ended with the group and the president largely agreeing to disagree, and with several participants concerned that the White House wasn’t going to fight hard enough to protect the votes of the very people whose enthusiasm had helped make him president twice, with another potentially disastrous midterm looming.
“Our view [was that] the interests we hold dear wouldn’t be served by having McConnell leading the Senate, so we were trying to do everything we [could] to increase black turnout,” the first participant said.
IN 2013 THE NATION MARKED THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF John F. Kennedy’s momentous civil rights speech, and remembered his assassination; the martyrdom of Medgar Evers; George Wallace’s stand in the schoolhouse door; Dr. King’s letter from a Birmingham jail and the March on Washington; and the children who paid, with their fire-hosed and dog-bitten bodies and with their lives, for the Birmingham campaign. The nation paused to remember four little girls who today could perhaps be grandmothers had they not been destroyed by bombs and fire with the 16th Street Baptist Church.
In addition to the country having reelected its first African American president, a bronze bust of Isabella Baumfree, the former slave who fought both for abolition and the rights of women and who at the age of forty-six renamed herself Sojourner Truth, now stood in the Capitol visitors’ center. A granite monument to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. peered out onto the National Mall, carved into the Stone of Hope, separated by a small expanse from the Stone of Despair.
And yet Barack Obama was still engaged in an ongoing dialogue with members of the black intellectual class, who parsed his every word and keynote and commencement speech for evidence of the hated dogma of “respectability,” which for many equated to blaming the victims of a house fire for getting burned.
Obama’s insistence on pursuing the Responsibility Gospel with black men, continually admonishing them to be better fathers, and the black community to get its young men off the street and into college classrooms, while refusing to adopt explicitly targeted policies to alleviate black economic suffering—hadn’t hurt him a whit with black voters, who, like many members of the Black Caucus, seemed to subordinate private concerns to their determination to protect the Obama presidency from its right-wing foes. Many African Americans believed members of the Right were openly disdainful of the president at least in part due to his race. With polls showing the president’s approval ratings remaining high with African Americans, if not at the stratospheric levels of the beginning of his term, the White House was not about to give in to demands from Capitol Hill, or from the pages of The Atlantic, or from Ebony.com, that he fix his policies with a black label. The White House team insisted that fixing the overall economy, along with broadly targeted health-care and education reform, was the best way to address the economic and health disparities in black households, who suffered disproportionately from both. It wasn’t necessary to launch a “Mashall Plan for Black America,” as some black lawmakers were calling for.
The difference of opinion rankled some in the black community who’d watched as the president championed specific remedies for discrimination against gays in the workplace and the military, women in terms of equal pay, and the Latino community with immigration reform. Some of them wondered, Why not African Americans?
Obama was slated to give the commencement address at Morehouse College on May 19, a singular honor for the school that was the alma mater of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and a jewel in the crown of the nation’s historically black colleges and universities. But Obama’s arrival was upstaged in advance by an editorial from a Morehouse alumnus, Rev. Kevin Johnson, the pastor of Bright Hope Baptist Church in Philadelphia; he was scheduled to speak ahead of the president. The column, in the black newspaper the Philadelphia Tribune, was titled, “A President for Everyone, Except Black People.” It referenced a recent letter to Obama from the incoming chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, Marcia Fudge, the former Ohio small-city mayor who’d succeeded the late Stephanie Tubbs Jones into the House. Fudge’s letter chided the White House for a lack of diversity in the president’s second-term cabinet, citing the implications for African Americans.
Johnson had a clear and familiar reference point for his criticism: the administration and diverse cabinet of William Jefferson Clinton.
“While having African Americans in senior cabinet positions does not guarantee an economic agenda that will advance Black people,” Johnson wrote, “it at least is a starting point and puts us in the driver’s seat. With President Obama, we are not in the driver’s seat or even in the car.” His critiques were echoed by Douglas Wilder, once an Obama supporter, who began publicly blasting the president over the predominantly white and male cast of his administration, and over the lack of targeted policies to address black economic pain.
With the op-ed gaining traction online, Johnson was promptly disinvited from the commencement by Morehouse’s president, prompting an outcry from liberals as well as conservatives, including an op-ed in National Review denouncing the college’s actions. Johnson’s speaking engagement was restored, but he would address the graduates during an earlier event, separate from the president’s appearance.
On the podium, Obama launched into his now-familiar admonitions to black men, confessing to the “bad choices” of his own youth, when he sometimes “wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down.
“But one of the things you’ve learned over the last four years,” the president said, “is that there’s no longer any room for excuses. I understand that there’s a common fraternity creed here at Morehouse: ‘excuses are tools of the incompetent, used to build bridges to nowhere and monuments of nothingness.’ We’ve got no time for excuses—not because the bitter legacies of slavery and segregation have vanished entirely; they haven’t. Not because racism and discrimination no longer exist; that’s still out there. It’s just that in today’s hyperconnected, hypercompetitive world, with a billion young people from China and India and Brazil entering the global workforce alongside you, nobody is going to give you anything you haven’t earned. And whatever hardships you may experience because of your race, they pale in comparison to the hardships previous generations endured—and overcame.”
Writing on The Atlantic’s website, Ta-Nehisi Coates called Obama “the scold of black America” and charged that “taking the full measure of the Obama presidency thus far, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this White House has one way of addressing the social ills that afflict black people—and particularly black youth—and another way of addressing everyone else.”
The speech touched off a rollicking debate among black and white intellectuals, who on one side consisting almost exclusively of black writers and thinkers, blasted Obama’s “responsibility gospel” as a blame-the-victim approach to struggling communities, and on the other, racially mixed side, pointed to the administration’s concrete accomplishments and their real and lasting implications for African Americans, who would disproportionately benefit from improved access to private health care, expanded Medicaid, the protec
tion from abuse by predatory lenders and credit card companies included in financial reform, and the easing of federal sentencing disparities between black and white defendants. Easing those concrete burdens on everyday life would mean more than a day’s restraint from the familiar church homilies on responsible behavior, Obama’s defenders, including respected writers like Jonathan Capehart and Jonathan Chait, contended. It was the age-old argument between behavior and outcomes, symbolism and targeted investment, outside forces and internal fortitude, and the power of each to enforce or alleviate systemic suffering. Obama had long since come down on one side of that debate, and it was not the side that many of the leading black writers and intellectuals of the day—Ta-Nehisi Coates, Melissa Harris-Perry, Jamelle Bouie, Jelani Cobb, Mychal Denzel Smith, Michael Eric Dyson, and others—were on.
Obama’s defenders argued that his black critics failed to recognize the breadth and depth of Republican resistance, not just to Obama’s agenda, but to his very being, and the tight restrictions around the explication of race that the country’s first black president operated under. For the nation’s first black president to announce a series of programs targeting his own racial community would only deepen Republican resistance, the argument went, and make Obama more politically toxic than he already was, not just to Republicans, but to moderate Democrats on the Hill. That would make getting any semblance of an agenda through Congress impossible.
“To expect the president to introduce an explicit and definable ‘black agenda’ in a Congress filled with people who believe him to be a socialist destroying the country while illegitimately occupying the Oval Office is seriously naïve,” Jonathan Capehart wrote in the Washington Post, a point echoed by Al Sharpton, who continually pointed out to these critics that Obama’s challenge when it came to maintaining his influence over American politics was to not only be the president of all Americans, but to be seen as such.
