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The accelerating efforts by the Trump administration and its allies to unwind the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement have the hallmarks of a new Redemption, the counter-revolution that stripped African-Americans of the civil and political rights they had gained in the Civil War and Reconstruction which ushered in nearly a century of Jim Crow.
Nowhere is this more marked than in the area of voting rights. Just as the myth of the war’s “noble cause” legitimated the end of Black representation in Congress and the systematic disenfranchisement of Black men, the myth of a “stolen” 2020 election is used to justify “election integrity” efforts that are stripping Americans, particularly vulnerable populations, of their essential democratic rights.
The ongoing targeting of voting rights, including the potential evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, limits on mail-in ballots, and the imposition of radical mid-decade racial and partisan gerrymandering, has also included an assault on youth voting rights, a lesser known outcome of the Second Reconstruction.
