The John Crow Era

[BootinUp]

Excerpt

Enter John Roberts. In John Roberts’ rarified and insulated world, it was easy to pretend that racial discrimination had ceased to exist. After all, he had attended private a Catholic boarding school and saw no discrimination there, Nor did he see any evidence of discrimination at Harvard Law School or the Harvard Law Review, where his intelligence and education allowed him to succeed, as he assumed was his birthright.

After clerking for then Associate Justice William Rehnquist, Roberts began to work for the Reagan administration, where he was shocked to learn that Congress believed it was still necessary to enforce the ancient guarantees of the 15th Amendment. As a baby lawyer, Roberts dedicated his life to ensuring that the guarantees of the 15th Amendment would be eviscerated by declaring that race could not be considered in remedies designed to fight racial discrimination

Roberts joined the fraternity of clueless white men who were born on third base and assumed they hit a triple. Having never seen, much less experienced, discrimination of any sort, he turned the 15th Amendment on its head: Any race-based remedy was itself a violation of the prohibition against denying the right to vote on the basis of color or race.

To be clear, I am not writing as a historian; the above is laden with sarcasm and righteous anger, but see generally Brennan Center for Justice, Chief Justice Roberts’s Vendetta Against the Voting Rights Act.

Here’s my point: The anti-voting artifices of the Jim Crow era employed the fiction that voting requirements like literacy tests, poll taxes, and property ownership were race-neutral. They were not. Their intent and effect were to discriminate.

https://open.substack.com/pub/roberthubbell/p/the-john-crow-era