No doubt we are all familiar with the dream Martin Luther King Jr had for his four little children. But, in so many ways, that dream has become a nightmare. Nothing betrays this fact quite like his namesake, MLK III, being all over TV last week damning two white Democratic senators to hell for blocking the latest efforts to enact federal voting-rights legislation.
Evidently, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia is a Manchurian Democrat; Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona is a McCain maverick wannabe. And only latent racism explains their lost-cause championing of the filibuster. Because it makes no sense for them to insist that Democratic partisanship to protect the voting rights of Blacks is a vice, while Republican partisanship to suppress the voting rights of Blacks is a virtue.
Mind you, MLK III could have spared a little of his moral indignation for Black Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina. Because it seems he’s doing such a good job of passing for white, nobody is questioning why he’s standing by as members of his party systematically roll back voting rights.
These, of course, are the rights that Blacks like Dr. King and John Lewis gave their lives and suffered all manner of harm to secure, respectively.
In any event, I think this recurring fight for voting rights is so insidiously racist that it’s surreal. First, there was the 15th Amendment, which granted voting rights to Blacks in 1870. Then came Jim Crow 1.0. Then there was the Voting Rights of 1965. Then came the simmering backlash to Black progress, which boiled over after Barack Obama was elected the first Black president of the United States.
Now there’s the doomed Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Notably, it was tailored to fend off thriving Republican Jim Crow 2.0 efforts to limit voting rights for Black folks across the country.
But why should Blacks continue fighting legislatively for this basic human right? This, especially given that it should have been as guaranteed to them as it has been to whites since Emancipation over 150 years ago.
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Alas, the parenthetical line of that famous Langston Hughes poem, “Let America Be America Again,” is what resonates with most Black Americans even today.
Frankly, abolitionists like Frederick Douglass must be rolling over in their graves. I mean, Blacks on this MLK Day are hinging their right to vote on the whims of two whites… from two southern states, no less. This is why it might be time to give up the fight for voting rights and prepare to fight the civil war 2.0, which Whites denying that right have been asking for.
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