May 5, 2014

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The civil rights community’s get-out-the-vote machine is slowly reawakening. But, given what’s at stake in this year’s mid-term elections, activists say, GOTV campaigners need to shake off the malaise—ASAP.

“It is too quiet, and we’ve got to get busy really fast,” said Melanie Campbell, president and CEO of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, adding that many groups seem to be in the planning stage.

Voter registration and turnout among communities of color and the young tend to drop in non-presidential election cycles, a tendency that will present one of the major challenges.

“Those drops are what allows so many shifts in the political landscape,” said Marvin Randolph, the NAACP’s senior vice president of campaigns. “Our goal is to ensure that is not the case….We’re going to be taking it to the streets this year.”

It was one of those political shifts that ushered in a series of laws that will prove the biggest obstacle to voter registration and mobilization efforts this year. In response to the historic election of President Barack Obama in 2008, the mid-term elections of 2010 saw the rise of the Tea Party as conservative Republicans flooded Congress, state legislatures and governor’s mansions across the country. And those empowered GOP legislators immediately set out to enact laws that would, ostensibly, combat voter fraud and increase elections integrity, but which, in reality, were meant to suppress the votes of minorities, the young, poor and others who tend to vote Democrat.

“We went from breakthrough in 2008 to backlash (with the rise of the Tea Party) to rollback (with the rise of voter suppression laws),” Randolph said.

“This has been the most coordinated attack on voting rights since Jim Crow,” added the NAACP leader of the wave of laws that cut early voting, increased residency requirements, demanded proof of citizenship, required photo IDs for registration and voting, gerrymandered districts and more.

In 2012, the NAACP and other pro-voting rights groups fought back against the repressive voting laws and the punditry that predicted waning Black enthusiasm over Obama’s presidency would be reflected in lower voter turnout.

“In 2012, not only did we run a get-out-the-vote and voter mobilization campaign, we also ran a campaign to fight voter suppression laws. We fought in the courts, in the court of public opinion and in the streets,” Randolph said.

Due to national and state level work, the NAACP was able to register more than 350,000 voters and mobilized 1.2 million people to the polls on or before Election Day, according to its website.

“The [GOP] backlash had a backlash: Your parents and mine did not wait to vote, they came early because they were educated by folks like the NAACP that their vote was under attack…. People stayed in line, sometimes for eight hours, because they wanted to exercise their right to vote,” Randolph said. “Those laws are what gave people the extra push…knowing that their rights were being impinged upon.”

Activists say they hope voters will be similarly motivated  this year, especially since GOP-led legislatures have become more emboldened, further reversing voters’ civil rights since the Supreme Court struck down Section 4 and invalidated Section 5 of the {Voting Rights Act}, which was used to legally challenge laws that blocked equal access to the ballot box.

But getting the electorate motivated will require waging a robust education campaign to combat voter confusion and disillusionment.

“We have to get information out early, early, early, to ensure that people are informed of their rights,” Campbell said.

Earlier this month, Campbell’s National Coalition on Black Civic Participation held a Black Youth Vote conference, where young people from 10 states gathered to get training on how to register and mobilize voters. The group also has a Power
of the Sister Vote campaign, which focuses on educating and mobilizing women voters.

“We tend to have a strong focus on women because when they have information they tend to pass it on to their families,” Campbell said.

This week, Rev. Al Sharpton and the National Action Network announced they are “gearing up” to launch a freedom summer campaign in key states—Arkansas, Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and Virginia—where  voting rights are under attack. The goal of the campaign will be to recruit and train volunteers to carry out voter registration drives and to help fight voter suppression by providing critical support to voters, such as driving seniors to get new IDs, babysitting children so that their parents can take time to get copies of their birth certificate, or holding townhalls to educate communities.

On May 1, the National Coalition of 100 Black Women – Central Alabama Chapter will host a nationally simulcast panel discussion on the impact of the repressive laws. The same day, the American Bar Association will host several events in Washington, D.C., focused on those barriers to voting and ways to combat them, and there are other similar initiatives.

Randolph, the NAACP campaigns director, said his organization has a year-long GOTV program, during which volunteers get “very intense” training in the use of “21st century campaign tactics.”

The organization has a database of almost 1 million voters that allows for targeted campaigning, and they will be looking to garner even more voters, he said.“We will be making phone calls, knocking on doors, putting announcements on the radio… [and] we have a very active campaign on social media,” Randolph said.

Campbell said pro-civic engagement groups may have to surmount the scarcity of resources available for GOTV efforts in a non-presidential election cycle, but vowed that what had to be done would be accomplished “with or without.”

With the Jim Crow-lite laws as a spur, coupled with the fast approaching 50th anniversary of the seminal Freedom Summer—a courageous attempt to register Black voters in the then-segregated South—Campbell said she believes GOTV efforts will soon go into high gear.

She promised, “It won’t be a quiet summer.” 

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - When racist statements made by Cliven Bundy, the Nevada rancher and conservative hero-of-the-month, hit the airwaves, his Republican boosters abandoned him like rats fleeing a sinking ship. But he has at least one stalwart supporter—his African-American bodyguard, Jason Bullock.

“I would take a bullet for that man if need be,” Bullock told CNN. “I look up to him like I do my own grandfather. I believe in his cause and after having met Mr. Bundy a few times, I have a really good feel about him and I’m a good judge of character. He’s shown me nothing but hospitality and treats me as his own family.”

Bullock may be the only Black person in America willing to give Bundy a pass on his insensitive remarks, including Bundy’s suggestion that Blacks were government moochers who were better off in slavery.

Propelled by robust Fox News coverage, Bundy shot into the public spotlight following his armed standoff with Bureau of Land Management rangers, who, with court order in hand, tried to confiscate his 500 cattle. Bundy owed the federal government some $1.1 million in fees for illegally grazing his herd on public land for more than 20 years, according to The New York Times.

The defiant 67-year-old became a hero of the right-wing’s fight against government overreach—until his unfiltered remarks about African Americans became public.

Bundy recalled passing public housing projects in North Las Vegas and seeing Blacks sitting around with “nothing to do.”

“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” Bundy told his supporters, as reported by the Times in an April 24 article. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

Bundy’s most prominent political supporters immediately began to distance themselves.

Nevada Republican Sen. Dean Heller, who has previously hailed Bundy as a “patriot,” said he “completely disagrees with Mr. Bundy’s appalling and racist statements, and condemns them in the most strenuous way,” according to Heller spokesman Chandler Smith.

Libertarian and potential presidential nominee Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was quick to follow, saying in a statement: “His remarks on race are offensive and I wholeheartedly disagree with him.”

Democrats also spoke out against Bundy, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who had previously called Bundy and his supporters “domestic terrorists.”

“Today, Bundy revealed himself to be a hateful racist,” Reid said in an April 24 statement. “But by denigrating people who work hard and play by the rules while he mooches off public land he also revealed himself to be a hypocrite.”

Reid also said it was irresponsible for Republican leaders to “romanticize such a dangerous individual” and called for a public condemnation of Bundy’s remarks.

Some prominent Black Republicans agreed, saying Bundy’s statements—and the somewhat tepid GOP response—further hardens minorities’ apathy towards the party.

“It undermines the broader, more important goals to rebrand and reestablish a conversation with a community that looks suspiciously upon most of the things you say,” Michael Steele, the former and first African-American Republican National Committee chairman, told The Washington Post.

Crystal Wright, a conservative commentator, who runs the blog ConservativeBlackChick.com, wrote in a CNN opinion piece that Republicans should not have embraced Bundy, and his defiant disregard for the U.S. Constitution, in the first place and decried those that continue to defend them.

“I don't know what’s more offensive: rancher Cliven Bundy telling Blacks they’d be better off as slaves picking cotton or conservatives who continue to defend him,” she wrote.

“The entire Bundy affair just makes the Republican Party look bad…. We have old White men saying offensive things to women and minorities, and I’m tired of it,” she added. “At a time when the GOP needs to bring more minorities into our tent—along with women for that matter—embracing fools like Bundy doesn’t help and certainly will put us farther down the path of losing in 2016.”