States Rights Redux

States Rights is code for discrimination. A century and a half ago, some states asserted the right to leave the union. As any first year law student knows, partnerships are destroyed when partners withdraw. To avoid destroying the union, we fought the nation’s bloodiest conflict and admitted traitors back into the country on generous terms. After all, Southern dead paid in blood for their defense of the peculiar institution.
Fifty years ago, all Americans were free, but blacks were routinely denied the ballot and women had held the franchise for only a generation. Some states blocked access to the ballot with the same ferocity and on the same grounds that they stood in school house doors with ax handles – states rights. Denial of the ballot was premised on the right of states to control all election processes and procedures.
By eradicating widespread disenfranchisement in Dixie and in urban areas outside the Old South, the Voting Rights Act proved to be one of the most effective pieces of federal legislation ever enacted. It ranks with the 14th Amendment and the Commerce clause in changing the lives of Americans everywhere – for the better.
Like any new device, it took time for blacks and progressive whites to fully utilize the Voting Rights Act. Section V is a powerful tool and a near-anomaly in the law, requiring prior Department of Justice approval before states or other covered jurisdictions can make changes to voting processes and procedures. But its power derives from the circumstances surrounding its implementation. Some jurisdictions were so determined to deny minority groups the right to vote that they could not be trusted to manage their own elections. Eventually, the Jackson campaigns of 1984 and 1988 ushered in a new era of black political participation with thousands of black elected officials suing to create single-member districts where minority voting strength could be felt and breaking down the barriers to voter registration.
Motor Voter was an important milestone in the march toward full enfranchisement. Gone were the last vestiges of voter intimidation and courthouse-only registration. Potential voters could register at the public library, in school, at public agency offices and in door-to-door campaigns mounted by activists. And they could document their citizenship and residency in dozens of ways: utility bills, passports, birth certificates, student i.d. cards were all acceptable forms of identification.
But now, frightened by the country’s demographic realities and emboldened by a rightwing federal judiciary leftover from the Reagan-Bush era, some radical conservatives are raising the terrible visages of voter suppression and states’ rights once again. The battlefields are familiar, yet different this time around. All-white enclaves that surround Atlanta are seceding from Fulton County to avoid black political power. Republican-controlled legislatures are packing black voters into segregated districts to create even more partisan influence, with an avowed aim of running whites completely out of the Democratic Party. More than thirty states, led by Georgia, have enacted draconian voter i.d. laws, despite miniscule evidence of voter impersonation fraud. Industrial states are punishing union members to break the most reliable source of progressive organizational and economic clout.
Thirty-five years ago Earth Wind and Fire sang, “When Will We Ever Learn?” When it comes to states rights vs. minority voting rights, apparently the answer is “never.” Fortunately, coalitions of conscience are coming together across the nation. Wisconsin, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan are refusing to allow voter suppression to push our nation quietly back into the bad old days of minority rule. Blacks, Latinos, women and labor union members are no longer junior associates – they are senior partners in the American experience.

WHY IS VOTING GETTING HARDER?

From the New York Times
June 5, 2011

They Want to Make Voting Harder?
One of the most promising recent trends in expanding political participation has been allowing people to vote in the weeks before Election Day, either in person or by mail. Early voting, which enables people to skip long lines and vote at more convenient times, has been increasingly popular over the last 15 years. It skyrocketed to a third of the vote in 2008, rising particularly in the South and among black voters supporting Barack Obama.

And that, of course, is why Republican lawmakers in the South are trying desperately to cut it back. Two states in the region have already reduced early-voting periods, and lawmakers in others are considering doing so. It is the latest element of a well-coordinated effort by Republican state legislators across the country to disenfranchise voters who tend to support Democrats, particularly minorities and young people.

The biggest part of that effort, imposing cumbersome requirements that voters have a government ID, has been painted as a response to voter fraud, an essentially nonexistent problem. But Republican lawmakers also have taken a good look at voting patterns, realized that early voting might have played a role in Mr. Obama’s 2008 victory, and now want to reduce that possibility in 2012.

Mr. Obama won North Carolina, for example, by less than 15,000 votes. That state has had early voting since 2000, and in 2008, more ballots were cast before Election Day than on it. Mr. Obama won those early votes by a comfortable margin. So it is no coincidence that the North Carolina House passed a measure — along party lines — that would cut the early voting period by a week, reducing it to a week and a half before the election. The Senate is preparing a similar bill, which we hope Gov. Beverly Perdue, a Democrat, will veto if it reaches her.

Republicans said the measure would save money, a claim as phony as saying widespread fraud necessitates ID cards. The North Carolina elections board, and many county boards, said it would actually cost more money, because they would have to open more voting sites and have less flexibility allocating staff members. Black lawmakers called it what it is: a modern whiff of Jim Crow.

More than half of the state’s black votes were cast before Election Day, compared with 40 percent of the white votes. A similar trend was evident elsewhere in the South, according to studies by the Early Voting Information Center, a nonpartisan academic center at Reed College in Oregon. Blacks voting early in the South jumped from about 13 percent in 2004 to 33 percent in 2008, according to the studies, significantly outpacing the percentage of whites.

One of the biggest jumps was in Georgia, where, over the objections of several black lawmakers, the Republican-dominated Legislature passed a bill in April that would cut back in-person early voting to 21 days, from 45 days. Florida just cut its early voting period to eight days, from 14. Florida also eliminated the Sunday before Election Day as an early-voting day; election experts note that will eliminate the practice of many African-Americans of voting directly after going to church.

Outside the region, the Republican-dominated Legislature in Ohio, a perennial battleground state, is about to restrict early voting, a move that Democrats say amounts to voter suppression and discrimination.

Thirty-three states and the District of Columbia now allow some form of early voting, a relic from the days when everyone seemed to agree that more voters were better for democracy. Republicans have recently decided that a larger electorate can hurt them.

Sentencing Commission Considers Retroactive Crack/Powder Fix

The U.S. Sentencing Commission is considering whether relief from crack/powder cocaine sentencing disparity should be applied retroactively. In plain English, a person who uses crack used to get prison sentences 100 times a long as those busted for powder cocaine. The bias against crack has been reduced for cases that occur in the future. But what about the 12000 people serving very long sentence for crack? Should they be entitled to shortened sentences? I think so, so long as no one was intentionally physically injured. Remember, these defendants have families and children. Their sentences were the result of runaway hyper-incarceration in the first place - part of a misguided war on drugs that fell most heavily on black and urban youth. The Sentencing Commission will vote on this matter any day now. I'd like to know what you think.

LaCheryl Thompson Gets Award

Furman Women's basketball coach LaCheryl Thompson was honored at Joseph D. Mathis Awards Luncheon. Coach Thompson has compiled an impressive record on the court and also has impressive administrative credentials.

Celebrating Greenville’s Coach Joe Mathis beyond Grid Iron Greatness

By Attorneys Janice L. Mathis and Davida Mathis

Our hearts are full of joy, gratitude and humility as we celebrate our father’s induction into the South Carolina Athletic Hall of Fame. As coach and athletic director of the legendary Sterling Tigers, from 1946 to 1968, Joseph D. Mathis led the football team to a record of 107-17-26, including four AAA State Championships in 1947, 1950, 1953 and 1956. He also coached basketball, baseball and track, taught physical education and social studies and was Assistant Principal at GHS, counselor and coach at League Middle and job placement counselor at Donaldson Vocational Center. He coached girls, including us, with the same fervor and insistence upon excellence that he demanded of the boys, at a time when equality for women was theoretical, at best.

A gridiron star at both Benedict and Allen, after earning a degree in history, Mathis landed the job of his dreams at his alma mater. He had no money, no father, no connections and made no excuses. Winning was important, but getting an education was paramount. One former student postponed college, believing the most rational thing to do was get a job immediately out of high school to help his struggling family. He says Daddy was “relentless” in encouraging him to go to college. A full year after high school graduation Mathis introduced the student to a college coach, the young athlete accepted a football scholarship, graduated, built a thriving business and helped his family more than he ever thought possible. There are enough stories like this to fill a book, or a movie.

One friend says he was disciplined, preferring as captain to ride the team bus back to Greenville than to party with his friends. A co-worker from the tight-knit Sterling faculty says he used Mama’s Belk card to buy clothes for needy students. A former student says he regularly walked the halls at Sterling, checking athletes’ grades and class attendance. He admonished us all, “don’t ever get in the give up formation.” He stressed fundamentals, academics and hard work as the keys to success. Numerous Tiger players, including Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, went on to stand out at colleges and universities throughout the nation, including Maryland State, University of Illinois, North Carolina A&T, Florida A&M and Pacific. A few, such as Arthur Jones, J.D. Smith, R.C. Gambrell, William Thompson and Lawrence Acker, played in the NFL.

In the days of deep segregation, he treated everyone the same and Greenville responded in kind. The team drew thousands of fans to home games and was regularly covered by the Greenville Piedmont and WFBC radio. Yet, he understood the fraught legal history of race relations in the South - his master’s thesis on race relations in Greenville during Reconstruction is still widely quoted by scholars.

Daddy helped to build a political infrastructure in Greenville's black neighborhoods allowing residents to elect representatives of their choice. He was elected to Greenville’s City Council in 1979, working to improve police pay and minority contractor participation, bring the Municipal Stadium and the Braves to Greenville, and annex Haywood Road.

He passed in 2002. He was fond of saying that he hoped there would be something to do in heaven. “Like what?” we asked. “Like helping people,” was his reply. We hope the Joseph D. Mathis award will inspire others to allow God to use him or her to turn adversity into independence and achievement.

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Attorney Janice Mathis is a practicing attorney and national vice president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition; she lives in Athens, Georgia. Attorney Davida Mathis is a former prosecutor and currently practices law in Greenville. She also Co-Chairs the Greenville Chapter of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition; she lives in Greenville, S.C. Both attorneys co-host the weekly radio program “Sisters In Law” on WAOK 1380 AM in Atlanta and blog at sistersinlaw.blogspot.com.

Georgia Lottery and HOPE Scholarships

KNOW THE FACTS The HOPE Scholarship originally was aimed at children from low-to-moderate income families, earning $66,000 per year or less. The Georgia Lottery devotes only 25% of its revenue to education. 75% goes to winnings, salaries and bonuses, advertising, overhead and reserve. Only 2.7% of black students who take the SAT score 1200 or better. If we enacted a family income cap of $140,000 per year, 95% of HOPE recipients could receive the full tuition grant. In order to qualify for the HOPE Scholarship under the new rules, high school students must take four additional upper-level courses in math, science and language. Under the new rules, a student who loses HOPE will have only one chance to regain it during his college career. Counties with large shares of African Americans receive relatively fewer scholarships to state institutions, which by far is the largest category of HOPE recipients.[1] The southern states relied on lotteries after the Civil War (1861-1865) to finance Reconstruction (1865-1877). “The tax that is built into the lottery is the most regressive tax we know.” The NGISC expresses serious concern about the heavy reliance of lotteries on less-educated, lower-income people. It also mentions that an unusually large number of lottery outlets are concentrated in poor neighborhoods.[2] The Carl Vinson Institute at the University of Georgia reports that lottery play was inversely related to education level. In other words, people with fewer years of education played the lottery more often than those with more years of education. It also finds that lottery spending per person was highest in counties where African-Americans made up a larger percentage of the population. McCrary and Pavlak report that African-Americans and less-educated people are more likely to be active lottery players than whites and more-educated people. Proceeds from the Georgia lottery fund only education programs. If these programs provide more benefits to the poor than to the wealthy, it could be argued that this compensates for the regressive nature of the state lottery. Studies criticize Georgia's lottery for providing more benefits to white households than to minority households. Cornwell and Mustard claim that counties with the highest incomes and white populations receive significantly more HOPE scholarships.[3] McCrary and Pavlak cite a common belief among lower-income people that playing the lottery is their only chance to escape poverty.[4] Haisley, Mostafa, and Loewenstein back up these studies, finding that people who perceive themselves as poor are more likely to buy lottery tickets than other people. Poor people see the lottery as a way to improve their financial situation. The researchers determine that poor people spending money on the lottery is a factor in their inability to improve their relative finances. Black scholarship recipients and those from lower income families (in Tennessee) retain their scholarship in lower numbers than whites and higher income families.[5] 55 percent of students from families with income less than $36,000 failed to maintain a sufficient GPA to retain their scholarships, while only 42 percent of those from families with income of more than $75,000 failed to retain their scholarships.[6] Upper-income families benefit more from the scholarship program than families in lower income brackets: In Hamilton County (TN), for example, the average student with a lottery scholarship comes from a family that makes $71,980 a year, compared to the $38,930 median household income the U.S. Census Bureau reports for the county. Average lottery sales per capita in Chicago’s mostly African-American zip codes were 29% to 33% higher than in mostly white or Hispanic zip code areas. The zip code with the highest lottery sales in the state, 60619, coincided with predominantly African-American and Latino low-income communities on the city's south side. Residents of that zip code spent nearly $23 million on lottery tickets during FY 2002.[7] In New Jersey, as in Georgia and elsewhere, study results clearly show that those who lived in poorer areas bought far more lottery tickets than those living in wealthy ones. People who resided in zip codes where the average income was less than $52,151 spent an average of $250 per year on the lottery, whereas those who lived in zip codes with an average salary of more than $141,132—spent $89 on lottery tickets each year. In addition, less wealthy neighborhoods had more lottery retailers per capita. The ratio of lottery retailers per 5,000 people was 4 to 1 in low-income areas, compared to roughly 1.5 to 1 in wealthy neighborhoods.[8] Minority and low-income students do not have proportionate access to higher education in lottery states.[9] Footnotes [1] http://www.terry.uga.edu/hope/hope.lottery.pdf [2] Philip J. Cook, one of the coauthors of the National Gambling Impact Study Commision’s (NGISC) Final Report. [3] Ross Rubenstein and Benjamin Scafidi, in “Who Pays and Who Benefits: Examining the Distributional Consequences of the Georgia Lottery for Education” (National Tax Journal, vol.52, no.2,June2002), and Christopher Cornwell and David Mustard, in The Distributional Impacts of Lottery Funded Merit-Based Aid (1999), [4] Joseph McCrary and Thomas J. Pavlak of the Vinson Institute of Government Studies at the University of Georgia review in Who Plays the Georgia Lottery?: Results of a Statewide Survey (2002,http://www.ncalg.org/Library/Studies and White Papers/Lotteries/Georgia Lottery.pdf) [5] Tennessee Education Lottery Scholarship's Annual Report for 2005-06. [6] Tennessee Education Lottery Scholarship Annual Report, 2006. [7] “ThePoorPlayMore”(Chicago Reporter, October 2002), Leah Samuel analyzes the lottery sales in Illinois since 1997 by comparing lottery sales figures around the state with income and demographic data from the 2000 census [8] Robert Gebeloff and Judy DeHaven report similar findings in “Who Really Pays for the Lottery” (Star-Ledger [Newark, New Jersey], December 6, 2005). Gebeloff and DeHaven gathered data on lottery sales in New Jersey by zip code and compared that data to income and population data for each zip code from 2000 to 2004. [9] In “State Lotteries: Their Effect on Equal Access to Higher Education” (Journal of Hispanic Higher Education, vol. 3, no. 1, 2004), Randall G. Bowden of Saint Leo University finds that