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Quote by Covenant A. Akinlotan

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Covenant A. Akinlotan

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“America was paralyzed; on one hand, by the power of the Southern Democrats in Congress, whose inordinate political strength and control of key committees was based on their ability to win reelection after reelection because of massive disfranchisement and racial terror; and on the other, by the missionary-like belief that America was the champion of democracy and freedom in the battle against the Soviet Union, whose death grip on human rights had no limits.”

RacismAmerican HistoryCold WarSoviet UnionUs HistoryVoter Suppression
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
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“The Civil Rights Act (1957), while seemingly a landmark piece of legislation, was actually a paper tiger that had no ability to protect the right to vote. The act did create the Civil Rights Commission, upgrade the Department of Justice's section on civil rights to a division, and authorize the U.S. attorney general to sue those violating the voting rights of American citizens. But it was—by design and implementation—no match for the entrenched resistance to black citizenship.”

RacismAmerican HistoryWhite SupremacyCivil Rights MovementUs HistorySuffrageVoter Suppression
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
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“The VRA was nevertheless a seismic shift in thought, action, and execution for the U.S. government when compared with the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and its equally enfeebled companion legislation of 1960. Rather than passively waiting for locales to violate the rights of American citizens and then sitting still until those who had been routinely brutalized by this system made a formal complaint, the VRA put the responsibility for adhering to the Constitution onto state and local governments.”

RacismAmerican HistoryCivil Rights MovementUs HistorySuffrageVoter SuppressionVoting Rights Act
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
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“Paul Weyrich, a conservative activist and founder of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which eventually crafted voter suppression legislation that spread like a cancer throughout the United States, was brutally clear: "I don't want everybody to vote.”

RacismAmerican HistoryUs HistorySuffrageVoter Suppression
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
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“All that had to happen was for the GOP to reinforce the lie of voter fraud, create the public perception of democracy imperiled, increase the groundswell to "protect the integrity of the ballot box," require exactly the type of identification that blacks, the poor, the young, and the elderly did not have, and, equally important, mask these acts of aggressive voter suppression behind the nobility of being "civic-minded.”

RacismAmerican HistoryUs HistorySuffrageAgeismVoter SuppressionVoter Fraud
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
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“A Republican seizure of power based not on the strength of the party's ideas but on massive disfranchisement denies citizens not only their rights, but also the "talisman" of humanity that voting represents. The lie of voter fraud breaks a World War II veteran down into a simple, horrifying statement: "I wasn't a citizen no more." It forces a man, a retired engineer who was instrumental in building this nation, into facing a bitter truth: "I am not wanted in this state." It eviscerates the key sense of self-worthy in a disabled man who has to pen the painful words "My constitutional rights have been stripped from me." It maligns thousands of African Americans who resiliently weathered the Missouri cold and hours of bureaucratic runarounds as nothing but criminals and frauds. It leaves a woman suffering from lung cancer absolutely "distraught" and convinced that "they prevented us from voting," because none of her IDs could penetrate Wisconsin's law. It shatters the dying wish of a woman who, in her last moments on earth, wanted to cast a vote for possibly the first woman president of the United States. But an expired driver's license meant none of that was to be.”

PoliticsRacismAmerican HistoryUs HistoryClassismVoter Suppression
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
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“Iowa congressman Steve King lamented the passing of "a time in American history when you had to be a male property owner in order to vote." Florida congressional candidate Ted Yoho echoed that sentiment when he also proffered, "You used to have to be a property owner to vote." Of course, after the Great Recession, with African American homeownership lower than it had been during the 1930s and the lowest of all ethnic and racial groups in the United States, the implications of the GOP longings were obvious.”

RacismAmerican HistoryUs HistoryClassismVoter Suppression
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
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“The anti-revolutionary temper of the Revolution belongs to 1787, not to 1776. Another element was at work, and it is the other element that is new, effective, characteristic, and added permanently to the experience of the world. The story of the revolted colonies impresses us first and most distinctly as the supreme manifestation of the law of resistance, as the abstract revolution in its purest and most perfect shape. No people was so free as the insurgents; no government less oppressive than the government which they overthrew. Those who deem Washington and Hamilton honest can apply the term to few European statesmen. Their example presents a thorn, not a cushion, and threatens all existing political forms, with the doubtful exception of the federal constitution of 1874. It teaches that men ought to be in arms even against a remote and constructive danger to their freedom; that even if the cloud is no bigger than a man’s hand, it is their right and duty to stake the national existence, to sacrifice lives and fortunes, to cover the country with a lake of blood, to shatter crowns and sceptres and fling parliaments into the sea. On this principle of subversion they erected their commonwealth, and by its virtue lifted the world out of its orbit and assigned a new course to history. Here or nowhere we have the broken chain, the rejected past, precedent and statute superseded by unwritten law, sons wiser than their fathers, ideas rooted in the future, reason cutting as clean as Atropos.”

AmericaRevolutionUsaUs HistoryAmerican RevolutionHistory Of AmericaWar Of Independence
Book:The History of Freedom and Other Essays
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