Editor's Note: This report is part of a project on voting rights in America produced by the Carnegie-Knight News21 program.
SELMA, Ala.—Joanne Bland, at age 11, marched
toward the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday in 1965 as hundreds of
African-Americans protested, demanding the right to vote. State troopers
beat her sister. Bland fainted in the clouds of tear gas.
Change followed, with Congress passing the
Voting Rights Act that same year. But 51 years later, a wave of new
voting laws has emerged in the Southern states, potentially
disenfranchising a large percentage of the roughly 3.72 million
unregistered African-Americans in the region as of 2012.
Nine Southern states have implemented voting
restrictions since 2012. Most require voters to show state-issued photo
ID at the polls.
African-Americans who fought for voting rights
during the Civil Rights movement claim the new laws are meant to secure a
Republican majority in states with large black populations that
consistently vote Democrat. In July, a North Carolina federal court
overturned the state's voter ID law, ruling that it targets
African-Americans "with almost surgical precision."
"It's all about the political will," said Anita
Earls, executive director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice.
"If you look at a map where African-American populations are the
largest, it's basically all of the Southern states, and that's where
most of these new voting restrictions have been enacted." But Southern
black lawmakers, activists and citizens say multiple factors have left
the African-American vote at its most vulnerable, citing apathy in the
post-Barack Obama era, the declining influence of former civil rights
activists and the difficulty of voter mobilization.
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