But the bluntest method states used to limit the numbers of blacks who could vote was to disenfranchise people convicted
of felonies. But not just any felonies. Starting with the post-Civil War period, these states went out of their way to focus
on crimes believed to be committed primarily by blacks. And so you had Alabama declaring in 1901 that its entire criminal
code was being designed specifically to "ensure white supremacy." And until about 35 years ago, Mississippi’s code didn’t
take the vote away from people who committed murder or rape, but it did disenfranchise people who engaged in interracial marriage.
Florida’s 1868 constitution gave larceny special scrutiny, under the assumption that all those freed former slaves were
about to go buck wild and start stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down.
What makes this tactic such an extraordinarily effective means of keeping blacks out of the voting booth is the fact that
once you’re a felon, you’re always a felon. You never lose that title, no matter how long ago your conviction
was. Which means that at this point, roughly one out of every eight black American men cannot vote because of some state’s
felon disenfranchisement law. Most of them are in the South. Florida – wouldn’t you know it – is #1, with
200,000 black men blocked from the booth. That is an incredible 31% of the state’s black men. Similar proportions of
black men in Alabama and Mississippi are also blocked.
The U.S Supreme Court has given the OK to felon disenfranchisement laws, despite their blatantly racist foundations. In
Richardson v Ramirez (1974), it said that these laws do not violate the 14th Amendment’s guarantee
of equal protection under the law, because that amendment makes exceptions for "participation in rebellion or other crime."
On the other hand, in Hunter v. Underwood (1985), the Court had a problem with Alabama’s law, which blocked people
for crimes of "moral turpitude," like homelessness. The Court felt the law was designed particularly to nail blacks, who in
Alabama were more likely to be flat broke than whites.
But in 2002, a federal court dismissed a similar lawsuit against Florida filed by the Brennan Center for Justice. The suit
claimed that because the state’s law had a racist history and because the criminal justice system in Florida is skewed
against blacks, the law violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
But the court said everything was OK because Florida had rewritten its constitution in the 1960’s such that the laws
no longer had a racist intent.
What the court failed to take into account is that in 1982, Congress changed the Voting Rights Act so it would wipe out
any laws that had a racist impact on black voting rights, whether or not there was a racist intent. And by the
way, although the law may no longer have an explicitly racist intent, you can still see efforts to use it in cleverly racist
ways. For example, The Nation magazine reported that in 2000, a Republican Florida legislator proposed a bill to increase
the sentence for accepting welfare payments after finding a job from one year to one year plus a day. Why? Because that changes
the crime from a misdemeanor to a felony. And just who is more likely to receive welfare? Yep, black folks.
In Florida, as with several other states, there is only one way to get one’s voting rights back, and that is to apply
to the governor for clemency. Needless to say, it is easier for a brother to join the Ku Klux Klan than for a felon to get
clemency to vote again in Florida. In 2002, there were 40,000 felons there who had applied and were waiting to have their
rights restored. At that time, the Office of Executive Clemency was claiming that it got 200 to 300 applications per day,
and that it took 2 hours to review each one. And no wonder: the application was 16 pages long. My application for a mortgage
was shorter than that. And it asked for such personal and irrelevant information as the birth date of any person with whom
the applicant may have had a child out of wedlock. As Nicholas Thompson pointed out in The Washington Monthly, this
probing, suffocating application was essentially a modern day version of the old literacy tests. A couple of years later the
state trimmed down the application process somewhat, but there are still tens of thousands waiting to have their rights restored.
GET THE BOOK HERE
