Jonathan P. Baird

Of all the crummy things the U.S. Supreme Court majority has done including overturning Roe v Wade and issuing the Trump immunity decision, destroying the Voting Rights Act ranks at the top. The decision in the case of Louisiana v Callais was epically bad. It is almost Roger Taney-level bad. He was the author of the Dred Scott decision. It is like the Court has entirely lost track of the value of equality, a fundamental American value.

The Court demolished Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the only piece of the Act that had been left after earlier demolition. In 2013, in the Shelby County case, they eviscerated Section 5, the pre-clearance section. At that time, Chief Justice Roberts had reassured that Section 2 was “permanent” and would remain in place and be applied nation-wide.

To appreciate how bad this decision is it is necessary to revisit why the Voting Rights Act has been so important. Since Reconstruction until the 1960’s, black people in the South were denied the right to vote. Literacy tests, poll taxes and voter intimidation were the norm, effectively preventing exercise of the franchise. Before the Voting Rights Act only 7% of Mississippi’s black people were registered to vote even though blacks comprised 40% of the state’s population. All the Southern states had very low percentage of their black population able to vote.

No one knows how many black bodies disappeared forever into the rivers and swamps of the South because those individuals, who were considered too uppity, wanted to vote. Nor do we know how many of those who were lynched ended up in that situation because they had tried to vote. Southern states then had no black representation. White supremacy brutally ruled for almost 100 years.

When the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, it was because of the Civil Rights movement. So much advocacy, effort, blood and tears went into getting that law passed. The Court majority was oblivious to that history. President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act after Bloody Sunday and people like John Lewis making “good trouble”.

The Voting Rights Act literally changed the face of Southern politics. Just three years after the Act passed, Black voters registered in the South increased by 1.3 million people. By 1968, 60% of eligible black voters were registered, up from 7% in 1965.

To stay in power in the South, white supremacists changed tactics. They still worked to suppress the black vote. They now called themselves “conservatives” and they retooled the charges of voter fraud and corruption. These were the same charges earlier generations of white supremacists, the former Confederates, had employed during Reconstruction against black elected officials and their white allies to undermine their legitimacy.

It is forgotten now but in 1985, Jeff Sessions, then U.S. Attorney in Alabama, used the voter fraud allegation against black defendants, including Albert Turner, a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr. who had been beaten on Bloody Sunday. Turner had been leading voter registration drives. Sessions brought a case against the Marion Three (which included Turner and his wife). When questioned that he only targeted blacks, Sessions said:

“We will respond to any substantiated charge of voter fraud against whites or blacks. I know of no charges against white election officials in our jurisdiction.”

The Marion Three were acquitted by a federal jury. Turner explained his targeting: “I stand in the way of the white power structure”. The voter fraud narrative persists as a popular Republican tactic to winnow down the black vote. Trump has indulged the same narrative about the 2020 election complaining about places with large black voter concentrations.

Southern white racists have also used the tactic of voter caging since the 1980’s. That was a practice of sending mail to addresses on the voter rolls, compiling a list of the mail that was returned undelivered and purging voters on th list on the grounds that they don’t legally reside at their registered addresses. Republicans justified voter caging as a way to identify voter fraud but they focused their efforts on black and Latino neighborhoods only. Republicans used caging to eliminate thousands of minority voters from the rolls. They know that in close races, keeping the minority vote down could be decisive.

Contrary to the Supreme Court majority’s assumption both in Shelby County and Callais that things have changed in the South, those justices are living in a fantasy land. The Southern white power structure is getting rid of majority minority districts and they are gerrymandering like it was 1877. They fight equality tooth and nail and they never stopped fighting it. The same Jim Crow racism that ruled the South for much of American history has not gone away.

What the Supreme Court majority did in Callais was a white power grab. They did not have to decide the case this early in the term. They decided Callais to allow southern states time to re-district in 2026. In the past, the Court had said maps should not be redrawn close to an election but not this year. Callais was a gift to Donald Trump and his maximum gerrymandering scheme. Almost the minute Callais was decided, we saw a greatly expanded gerrymandering effort across many Southern states. These states are hell-bent on reducing black legislative representation to nothing.

All the Supreme Court’s anti-equality efforts are an affront to the Reconstruction era constitutional amendments, especially the Fifteenth Amendment.

In the name of colorblindness, the Supreme Court has given constitutional cover to racist policies and practices. We are seeing a counter-revolution against the civil rights movement. Never has the need for reforming the Supreme Court been more apparent.

In honor of this summer’s America 250/Concord 300 anniversary, the Concord Monitor asked its readers to offer a submission on the question: What does New Hampshire mean to you? Here is my submission.

As a city boy who grew up in the Philadelphia area, New Hampshire means elbow room. With Mt. Kearsarge in the background, the physical beauty of my town, Wilmot, is stunning. New Hampshire means a great place for dogs. For me it is about hiking back roads, trails and mountains with my golden retriever, Blue. It also means hoping Blue won’t get porcupined

New Hampshire means the darkness of a long winter but also the warmth of reading a book near my wood stove. It is the spring thaw also known as mud season where dirt roads turn to gravy and your car can literally sink in the road. We start hearing peepers and they are loud. Planting my tomato plants, the black flies get intense even before Memorial Day.

Living rural, it is hard not to love the long days of summer. As a morning person, I love the days lengthening in May. When the fall comes, I always hope there is no early frost to take out my garden. There are always the sly woodchucks too, hanging around.

Although it is little remembered now, New Hampshire was very much part of a proud New England abolitionist tradition. Abolitionists started as a tiny despised minority and ended up persuading much of the nation of the evil of slavery. Before the civil war, New Hampshire had radical abolitionist leaders like Nathaniel Peabody Rogers, editor of an anti-slavery newspaper, Senator John P. Hale who opposed slavery’s expansion and Parker and Sarah Pillsbury who were both in the William Lloyd Garrison wing of the abolition movement. They were ahead of their time.

In 1835, abolitionists opened a racially and sexually integrated school, Noyes Academy, in Canaan. Many young black men and women flocked to the school. It ended up being destroyed by a mob but the school had brought black and white students together. Considering the racism that still defines America, I am proud there was an anti-racist tradition in our state and that New Hampshire pioneered integration. That is the New Hampshire I am proud of.

I just drove down to Philadelphia and I realized another reason I like New Hampshire: lack of traffic jams. After hours on the Garden State Parkway, I am happy to report we have no equivalent even on busiest days. If there is a traffic slow down it might be caused by a flock of wild turkeys stubbornly lolling in the road.

Back in the 1980’s I moved to New Hampshire to start a legal career. For me, New Hampshire means New Hampshire Legal Assistance. Talk about an underapppreciated, devalued asset. New Hampshire Legal Assistance has helped thousands of the neediest and most vulnerable people in our state for over 50 years. Its contribution to the well-being of people in the state has been immense and life-changing. New Hampshire Legal Assistance has maintained a tradition of excellence that continues to this day.

There is, of course, a dark side to New Hampshire but for today, the good stuff deserves highlighting.

One of the biggest tragedies of the Trump regime has been the havoc it has created in the Department of Justice (DOJ). Previously highly regarded, the DOJ has been emptied and partially repopulated. Many ethical and competent attorneys have exited the DOJ. What is left is a shell of its former self. Regime loyalists, opportunists and careerists trying to survive remain. Lawyers who remain have to wonder if their actions now at the service of a corrupt president will lead to disciplinary actions later, like disbarment.

The DOJ should be renamed the Department of Trump. Instead of its prior role as a law firm with commitment to serving the American people, the replacement version led by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is slavishly devoted to the whims of Dear Leader, no matter how absurd. Whether it is covering up Epstein files or advocating for the grandiose ballroom, the DOJ will do whatever is demanded.

If Trump wants to pursue his vendetta against his political enemies, DOJ falls into line. We have seen that with the prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Trump targets enemies and the DOJ attempts to create a case out of almost nothing.

The malicious prosecution of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a long-time leading civil rights organization, fits the pattern. The prosecution borders on the incomprehensible. Lawyers competing to advance their careers and gain Trump’s attention are willing to file trash lawsuits. A whistleblower has already come forward saying that a top official working in Todd Blanche’s office pressured prosecutors to file the SPLC case in spite of serious misgivings about the strength of the case.

To appreciate the evil of this prosecution, history is helpful. For almost 100 years, the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists terrorized African American communities in the South. The Klan’s murders, massacres, floggings, rapes and castrations were legendary. They were almost never stopped. In the South, white supremacy was an institutionalized way of life.

The Equal Justice Institute documented nearly 6500 racial terror lynchings between 1865 and 1950. Lynchings evolved from events carried out in the dark by night riders who were afraid of being recognized to public spectacles attended by huge crowds. In his book, Klan Wars, Fergus Bordewich wrote:

“Americans embraced a kind of vast willful forgetting, the mental erasure of an entire era, which in turn shaped the writing of a falsified history that influenced generations to follow. The replacement of fact with fiction was breathtaking.”

To this day, the Republican Party maintains that vast willful forgetting. Racism never happened. Well into the 20th century, the failure of American responsibility continued. Thousands of lynching victims never received justice and perpetuation of heinous crimes were almost never prosecuted. White supremacy maintained a position of dominance until the advent of the civil rights movement.

It was extremely dangerous to stand up against the racist terror but the SPLC did it. In 1971, lawyers Morris Dees, Joseph Levin Jr, and activist Julian Bond founded the SPLC. Bond was the first president. The SPLC filed many cases challenging racial and sexual discrimination in the South. In 1975, they successfuly defended Joanne Little, a black woman accused of murdering a white jail guard in North Carolina who had attempted to rape her. The SPLC filed tort suits holding the Klan financially responsible for acts of violence committed by its members.

Its biggest case was its role in 1981 in representing the mother of a 19 year old lynching victim, Michael Donald. Angry that an interracial jury had failed to convict a black man for killing a white police officer, two members of the United Klans of America abducted an innocent black youth, cut his throat and hung his body from a tree on a residential street in Mobile, Alabama. In 1987, SPLC attorneys won a historic $7 million verdict against the Klan members. The suit bankrupted the Klan, They were forced to turn over their headquarters to the victim’s mother.

For five decades the SPLC has tracked white supremacists and has monitored hate groups. They produced Teaching Tolerance, a program to provide free classroom materials on tolerance and diversity to teachers. The SPLC has won innumerable cases against hate groups. They did sometimes use paid informants to infiltrate hate groups, a practice that ended three years ago. This is a practice the FBI also used and SPLC previously shared information learned with the FBI.

The DOJ lawsuit against SPLC alleges that SPLC defrauded its donors by paying informants inside racist groups like the Klan and the Aryan Nation. But no donor to SPLC has come forward to complain about the covert informer program. In its pleadings, the DOJ names no name, a serious legal deficiency. The government actually alleged that SPLC is trying to manufacture racism. They are saying paid informants took money they received from SPLC and plowed it back into hate groups.

Anyone who knows Southern history would know that over the last 55 years the SPLC has been an effective legal advocacy group that had the courage to stand up to the Klan and white supremacy. Hardly any group had that courage for 100 years because Southern racists would harm or kill them.

The Trump regime doesn’t like the SPLC because it has investigated and pursued Trump allies on the Far Right like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and January 6 defendants. This prosecution is an attempt to put a political enemy out of business. They want to make it more difficult for civil rights organizations to track racist extremists and oppose hate. The SPLC prosecution is part of a racist project to turn back the clock to a time before the civil rights movement.