A gutted Voting Rights Act doesn’t erase Democrats’ unpaid debt to Black voters

Democrats are asking Black voters to do again what we have done every cycle for 60 years: show up, carry the party, accept the thanks that arrives as a press release. I spent 20 years inside that arrangement. The accounting is overdue.

Black voters loaned the Democratic Party a country in 2020. The party spent it on everything except the lender. Here are the receipts.

My count of 2020 Federal Election Commission data shows Georgia flipped for Democrats by just under 12,000 votes, Pennsylvania by 81,000 and Wisconsin by 21,000. Joe Biden won 92 percent of Black voters nationally.

In short, without that coalition, Trump wins.

By 2024, Trump’s share of Black men younger than 45 had doubled to roughly 26 percent. Democrats went on cable and called it a messaging problem. It was not a messaging problem. The problem was that Black voters are not a base. We are creditors, and the debt was far past due.

On Aug. 6, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. Five months earlier, John Lewis and 600 other marchers had been beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma for walking toward a courthouse to register to vote.

Before the act, Southern states ran an open suppression system. They used literacy tests, poll taxes and grandfather clauses to stop Black people from voting. They inflicted violence so routine that it had a schedule.

In Mississippi, only 6.7 percent of eligible Black voters were registered to vote in 1964. As times changed, Alabama went from 11 percent Black voter registration to 51 percent. According to the ACLU, Georgia went from three Black elected officials to 495. The Voting Rights Act was not a courtesy. It was the enforcement of rights the........

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