Virvus Jones was giving me a master lesson in voting rights.
We were meeting for coffee in the fall of 2012. I had asked for the meeting so Jones, a longtime veteran of ºüÀêÊÓƵ politics, could help me better understand the Black-white divide in local elections and why, from my perspective, the chasm seemed so deep and wide.
The timing was interesting. My son and I were reading a book together about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., focused on the civil rights movement. Jones, who is 75, shares a birthday — Jan. 15 — with King. He doesn’t have to read about the civil rights movement. He lived it.
Jones’ daughter, ºüÀêÊÓƵ Mayor Tishaura O. Jones, is a few years younger than me. We are roughly of the same generation. I was born in 1966, the year after the .
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In my mind, as I was reading with my son about King and teaching him about the civil rights movement, 1965 seemed so long ago. Not so, Jones told me. His daughter was among the first generation of Black people in ºüÀêÊÓƵ to grow up with the benefits of the Voting Rights Act, which put an end to Jim Crow-era rules put in place in some jurisdictions to keep Black people from voting. The law also, until the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 diluted the act, required the federal Department of Justice to preapprove changes to voting laws in states where discrimination against Blacks and other minorities had been rampant.
At the time, just a year after my meeting with Jones, Chief Justice John Roberts had determined that America was living in a post-racial reality, that the discrimination of the past was old news. that the “40-year-old facts†that led Congress to pass the sweeping voting protections have “no logical relation to the present day.â€
Roberts was wrong, of course, as has been made exceedingly obvious in the past several months, as Republicans in mostly the same Southern states that were subject to the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance requirements are working overtime to pass sweeping changes to state voting laws that will make it harder for Black people to vote and, worse, will allow partisan bad actors in state legislatures to overturn the results of elections they don’t like.
When the Roberts court issued that fateful ruling in the case, I remember thinking back to my meeting with Jones. One of the reasons ºüÀêÊÓƵ continues to be divided by race, he told me, was because the voters of his generation, and even the one older than him, folks closer to King’s age, remember what it was like to vote without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act. And those younger voters, the ones who elected his daughter as the first Black female mayor in the city’s history, want to make sure those rights aren’t diminished.
But that’s what’s happening, more than four decades after King’s death, as Georgia and Texas and Florida and more than a dozen other states have passed laws that make it harder to vote. Missouri could be next, and make no mistake, many of the provisions of these laws, such as reducing polling places or getting rid of drop boxes or limiting voting hours, will have a direct and negative impact on Black voters, .
It’s not an accident that former President Donald Trump’s Big Lie, his attempt to undo the results of the 2020 presidential election he lost to President Joe Biden, focused on voters in Philadelphia, Detroit and Atlanta. Each city has large Black populations.
Jones taught me that from the Black perspective, 1965 was a hell of a lot closer in the past than I thought it was, and today, as we celebrate King’s memory, that evidence is made clearer by the inability to pass new versions of the Voting Rights Act through Congress, trying to undo the damage done by the Supreme Court nearly a decade ago, and by Republican-led legislatures in real time.
King taught us that the “arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.†In 2022, as it relates to voting rights for Black people, that’s sadly not true.