HOT TAKES! - White Revenge Politics and the Fight Over Voting Rights!

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]I hope that you're feeling well. Hope that you slept well. I hope you had a good night because I need to I need you to be wide awake for me this morning. I have not had coffee. I need some coffee.

[00:00:08]I need you to be present. I need more. I probably need a big cup of coffee this morning. And I need you to be with me because what I have to say today, I have been thinking about since before I opened my eyes. And uh I'm not going to dance around it. I'm not going to try to soften any of it. Um I'm going to give it to you. I'm going to give you to you to both sides.

[00:00:27]give you both sides because there I'm not gonna give you both sides because there are not two sides to what I'm about to say. I hate that like two sides. Paul said, "Well, what about the other side?" There's no other side to this. There's history and there is what is happening right now and they are the same thing. So, let me start at the beginning. All right, just to educate some people who may not know. Maybe there's some MAGA folks in here. Maybe there are some Republicans. Maybe there's some people who just don't know history because they're trying to erase black people from history. and from the history books. Now, I want to start from the very beginning, and I don't mean not just this morning's beginning, the real beginning. After the Civil War, black people in this country did something extraordinary, something that terrified a lot of white people.

[00:01:12]Uh, very simply, they voted. They held office. They built schools. They built businesses. They were productive members of society. They built communities.

[00:01:23]And we all I'm going to tell you what happened. And they elected black senators and black congressmen and black sheriffs, black judges and states that had enslaved them and states that had treated them as property and states that had said that they were not fully human.

[00:01:38]Black people looked at all of that and said anyway, okay, we're here. We're citizens. We're going to participate in this democracy that claimed to be for everybody.

[00:01:50]And then white men looked at that and they decided they were not going to allow it. So they rewrote the maps.

[00:01:59]They changed the laws. They formed the Ku Klux Clan and rode through the night and burned and lynched and terrorized.

[00:02:08]And when the federal government pulled its troops out of the South in 1877, left black people without protection, they institutionalized all of it.

[00:02:18]They called it redemption, which is one of the most dishonest words ever used in the American political history.

[00:02:29]Because what they were redeeming was white power. That's it.

[00:02:35]That's all it was. And then came Jim Crow, pole taxes, literacy tests with no right answers.

[00:02:46]How do you know? How can you count bubbles? How do you know how many jelly beans were in a jar? Then came grandfather clauses, violence at polling places, entire systems designed with one purpose, and that's to take back what black people had earned to erase black political power before it could threaten white political power.

[00:03:08]And black people fought.

[00:03:11]I mean, Lord, they fought. And many of them lost their lives. They marched.

[00:03:15]They organized. They were beaten on bridges. They were bombed in churches.

[00:03:21]They were murdered in their beds and on their porches and in their cars and on the side of the road.

[00:03:28]Lynchings.

[00:03:32]And so then came the Selma marches.

[00:03:36]Watch.

[00:03:38]On March 7th, 1965, 600 people marched into history.

[00:03:49]People often ask me, "WHY DO YOU COME BACK?" We come to sell to be renewed.

[00:03:57]>> We come to be reminded that we must do the work that justice and equality calls us to do.

[00:04:04]>> Man, I miss John Lewis. And in 1965, after all of that, after all of that blood and sacrifice and grief, Lyndon Johnson finally signed the Voting Rights Act. And people cried because it felt like finally, finally the law was on their side. Finally, the country was going to live up to what they said it was.

[00:04:25]More Voting Rights Act.

[00:04:30]The Voting Rights Act is not just a victory for black Americans. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr., it enriches the lives of all Americans.

[00:04:40]>> The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a very big deal. It transformed America, marking the end of the Jim Crow era and effectively banning racial discrimination in elections.

[00:04:50]>> When Lynden Johnson came into office, she made black civil rights a priority.

[00:04:56]It is to give all our people the right to choose their leaders. To deny this right, I think is to deny democracy itself.

[00:05:08]>> H no one is saying that. They're saying the exact opposite now. That was 61 years ago. And I am sitting here this morning telling you that this Supreme Court just issued a ruling that Justice Kagan said could produce the largest reduction in minority representation since the end of reconstruction. since the end of reconstruction, the period I just described to you, the period where black people were stripped of everything they had built after the Civil War.

[00:05:35]We're not headed back there. We are back there. The Alabama Supreme Court just wiped out a black congressional district 9 days before a primary.

[00:05:47]People had already cast their absentee ballots. They had their ballots in their hands.

[00:05:54]And that's not the only state. Florida already moved. Louisiana moving now.

[00:05:58]Virginia is lining up. Tennessee, we told you we we the big reports last week.

[00:06:06]They are not waiting right now.

[00:06:09]They are not deliberating. They saw that ruling come down and they moved like it had they had been waiting for permission because they had been waiting for permission. Now, let me just say this because I need to say this and I need to say it clearly because I'm I'm just tired right now. I'm tired of watching journalists and commentators and politicians and pundits step around this word like it's broken glass on the floor. Like, oh, we can't say it. They have to whisper it. Like they, you know, if they say it out loud, something bad is going to happen. Like saying it is something more dangerous than the thing itself.

[00:06:43]What is happening to black voters in this country right now is racist.

[00:06:48]That's the word. Not a hot take, not a partisan talking point, not inflammatory rhetoric. It's just racist. The same motivation that ended reconstruction is the motivation behind what is happening right now. The same fear of black political power, the same calculation that if black people vote in their full numbers and their full strength, then certain people cannot win. And rather than change their agenda to appeal to more people, they change the rules to count fewer people. They make it harder for people to have access to the voting process. That is what this is.

[00:07:26]That has always been what it is.

[00:07:30]My friend Rachel Matt laid it out last week, and she was right. This is not a series of unrelated policy decisions.

[00:07:37]This is a coordinated 16-month campaign.

[00:07:40]They gutted the Voting Rights Act. They wiped out anti-discrimination protections that have been on the books since 1965. They are eliminating black congressional representation across the South. They fired black officials across every federal agency. And they rescended the executive order banning discrimination by federal contractors, an order that has existed since Lyndon Johnson signed it.

[00:08:03]Lyndon Johnson.

[00:08:08]We we've gone back past Lyndon Johnson.

[00:08:12]And here's the one thing that you need to really hear right now. The federal government of the United States of America no longer explicitly prohibits its contractors from having segregated restaurants, segregated waiting rooms, segregated drinking fountains. That prohibition is gone. In 2026, in the country that put a man on the moon, in the country that has a Martin Luther King memorial on the National Mall, in a country that just finished celebrating its 250th anniversary while telling itself what a great experiment in democracy it has been. Segregated drinking fountains are not explicitly prohibited by the federal government today.

[00:08:54]And people will say, "Don, you are being dramatic. You are being political. you are race baiting. And when I say to something, when I say something about that, I've heard that my entire career, I've heard that for as many as my more than 50 years on this planet.

[00:09:15]Every time a black person names a racist thing, somebody accuses them of making it about race as if it was not already about race. as if the people who drew these maps were not thinking about race every single second they were drawing them. The racism was there before I named it. And naming it does not create it. Naming it just means that we can see it clearly enough to fight it.

[00:09:41]So in case you haven't seen me before, maybe you don't know that I speak my mind. I have no other choice. I'm Don Lemon. I've been a journalist for more than 30 years. I've sat across from presidents and senators and generals and dictators and I have tried to be fair and I've tried to be balanced and I've tried to present every side. And I'm telling you right now, there is no balance to be found here. There is no other side of this that deserves equal time. What is happening to black voters in this country, it is a crime. It is deliberate. It's documented, historically familiar attempts to erase black political power is what it is. I know that this is this moment right now is heavy. What I'm saying is heavy. I know that some mornings you just want to wake up and you just want to have your coffee and you just want to, you know, get have a few minutes before the world comes in. I know all of that. And and when I'm writing the newsletter in the morning and I'm thinking about what I'm going to say, I'm very conscious of that. This morning I took a long a lot longer time uh because I thought this story is the most important story I believe in modern history because it changes the trajectory of our country. And so I understand all those things like people just I can't I can't take anymore whatever you can't bury your heads in the sand. You cannot just ignore ignore it. I feel you though. But I also know that people who are moving fast on these maps and these courts and these laws that they are counting on your fatigue.

[00:11:15]They are counting on you being tired.

[00:11:18]They are counting on you feeling like it is too much and there is nothing that you can do anyway, so you may as well not pay attention or I'm just going to this is for the other people and I'm just going to do that. Yeah. Is it a is it a white people problem? Yes. But is also a black people problem because we're the one who's who the ones who are going to get discriminated against. We can't just say, "Well, white people talk to white people." Yes, that's absolutely true. White people have to talk to white people. But we also have to do what we have to do in order to save ourselves.

[00:11:50]I'm not going to, you know, if I if I'm on a sinking ship and they throw a lifeboat there, I'm not going to say, "Well, I'm not going to get on that boat because the captain is supposed to save me.

[00:12:02]you better get your ass in that boat or swim. It's sink or swim. Nobody's coming to save us.

[00:12:09]So, they're counting on you not paying attention or you sort of obuscating or saying, "Oh, this is somebody else's problem." And that's not an accident that they're doing it. Overwhelming people is the strategy here. Division, of course. Yes. Making the news feel like a a flood that you can't swim through is the strategy here. They want you to give up. They want you to stay home. They want you to feel like like your your votes don't matter because they know that your vote that your your actual vote is the one thing that they cannot fully control.

[00:12:47]So yet I'm still asking you to stay in this fight. Not for me.

[00:12:58]For the people who who bled on that bridge in Selma. For the people who sat at those lunch counters and got milkshakes poured on their heads, hot water thrown at them, hoses, grease, all the stuff, all the things. And they just kept they kept sitting there.

[00:13:21]for the people who registered voters in Mississippi in the summer of 1964 knowing what could happen to them and they just did it anyway.

[00:13:35]And and now we're so comfortable. I can't do that. I'm not going to mess up my Gucci bag.

[00:13:44]I got to pay my Ben's note.

[00:13:50]I'm talking to you. I said it because no one is coming to save us. We can talk about all the things that people are doing wrong. They are doing it. They don't care. Yes, it this is racism. Yes, it's white people. Yes, it's mainly white men. Yes, yes, yes. But nobody's coming. That's even more proof that nobody is coming to save us because they don't give a But the people who did what I said, those people did not have the option of being tired. They didn't have the option of being comfortable. They probably had no money in the bank. They may not even had a car.

[00:14:27]They barely had a house. I'm sure.

[00:14:31]Come on now. For those of us who are of a certain age, we know what it was like back then. And I don't even know what it was like back then before my parents.

[00:14:37]And then and so on and so on.

[00:14:42]But we don't have that option either right now. The Alabama primary is May 19th, one week from today. A map that was drawn to dilute your vote.

[00:14:56]So, I'm saying show up anyway, especially anyway, because there are certain there are a few things that I know. I know what I know and I know what I don't know. And this is the thing that I hold on to when the news gets this heavy.

[00:15:12]They have tried to erase not just black political power, but black people before over and over and over again. And when are they going to realize they can't?

[00:15:23]That we ain't going nowhere. That they wouldn't have a country without us. That they would have no culture without us.

[00:15:29]They have tried it to do it with violence and and with law and with courts and with maps and with terror.

[00:15:37]And black people are still here. We still here. I know the correct grammars.

[00:15:41]We're still here. But I'm saying we still here, if you know what I'm saying.

[00:15:45]Still voting, still running, still winning, still building.

[00:15:51]They tried to bury us.

[00:15:56]But they didn't know that we were seeds.

[00:15:59]Roll it, Andy.

[00:16:03]The March in Washington is still the largest demonstration in DC for human rights, for civil rights.

[00:16:14]>> And people found out about it back in 1963 through flyers like this one. It's not black America faces a crisis. It's America. All of us are facing this crisis.

[00:16:27]>> Freedom Now movement. Hear me. We are requesting all citizens to move into Washington to go by plane, by car, bus, any way that you can get there. Walk if necessary. We are pushing for jobs, housing, desegregated schools. This is an urgent request. Please join. Go to Washington.

[00:16:50]>> And that is our history. And I think right now it's got to be our future. It's not our present. It's got to be our future.

[00:16:59]I'm not saying that that this is going to be exactly like the civil rights movement or the March on Washington, but people have been saying for years that uh what was the thing that Carl Bernstein used to say something about a cold something a cold civil war or something like that. But a civil war is happening in this country. People have been predicting it forever. We're this is it.

[00:17:26]We're in it and history in this case is on our side.

[00:17:37]So, make sure you not just wake up, but stay woke. Thanks for watching everybody. I appreciate you. Make sure you like, subscribe, and turn on notifications so you don't miss anything. We're live weekdays at 10:00 a.m. and 5:00 p p.m. Eastern with new content at 2:00 p.m. Eastern, sometimes at 8:00 p.m. So follow the Don Lemon Show wherever you are. YouTube, Tik Tok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitch, Substack, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Apple Podcast, we are everywhere and we're there every day. And if you want a little more, join the Limit community. Exclusive posts, behind the scenes, live chats. Just hit join or check the channel pages. All right, I'll see you next time.