The Ignorant Racist South, The reason We needed a Voting Rights Act

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]black applicant might be asked to interpret a some complicated section of the Constitution. Tell me what the who wrote the Constitution and what day was it? You can't even read, okay?

[00:00:14]Right? Tell me about the equal protection clause under the Constitution. What does the 13th Amendment say? They don't even know what the What does the first and second Amendment talk about?

[00:00:23]But the white folks, you know, they they might have passed without even having a real test. And so the point wasn't literacy, the point was to try to exclude people. And that result and the results were exactly what the government planned. So in 1964, black voter registration in the South was still suppressed. Mississippi only Mind you, Mississippi had a has a bunch of black people, right? But only 6.7 of them were eligible to vote, okay? Were registered in 1964. Think about that. Less than seven out of every 100 black black men citizens in in Mississippi were registered to vote.

[00:01:01]And that wasn't because they didn't care about voting. That wasn't because they didn't care about where their money went and who spent it. That was because the state had built a political machine designed to keep black people politically powerless. And in Alabama, black voters registered registration was also suppressed before the Voting Rights Act. And only 19.3% of adult black folk in Alabama were registered to vote in 1964.

[00:01:26]And after the Voting Rights Act, that number rose to 61.3% by 1969.

[00:01:32]So that statistic still tells the whole That statistic tells a story.

[00:01:38]Okay? Black people didn't suddenly become interested in voting in 1965.

[00:01:42]We've been wanting to do cuz we already had a serving in wars, okay? They had us serving in wars.

[00:01:50]And so the federal government said we have to start cracking down and these walls. And of course you guys remember the Freedom Riders and the bus riders, all those young kids would come down from the north. That's how people end up getting, you know, killed. You see, they came down to register black voters. So, those white kids put their white bodies in front of those white billy clubs. Of course, there was black children, too. Jewish, everybody was involved. And they made a big spectacle out of it. Now, the Voting Rights Act had an immediate impact, okay? And so, by the 9 in the 1965, about 250,000 new black people had registered to vote. And and and and 1/3 of them were registered by federal poll examiners, okay? And and and and and black registration increased from less than 1/3 in 1965 and more more and and by the end of '66, only four of the 13 southern states had black voters registered. Now, here's the cold part about it. The white folk that didn't want black people to vote, they'll say stuff, "Oh, they don't want to vote anyway. The blacks don't want to vote.

[00:02:56]They don't want to protest. Oh, our blacks are happy. Our are happy down here. They don't want to vote." And then I guess, you know, that's that's the BS cuz of course, we know that we want to participate. We want to know where we want to be in charge where our money's going. We want the money that we pay into the taxes to go to our children. Of course, we do.

[00:03:16]We want that money to go to our school.

[00:03:17]So, of course, we wanted to vote. And and as you could see, they registered to vote in droves. Now, remember, what's happening on the ground? Black people weren't merely asking for abstract rights.

[00:03:31]We were living under local governments that controlled every part of our lives.

[00:03:35]Local officials controlled the schools, they controlled the police, they controlled the public jobs, okay?

[00:03:41]They controlled the roads, the drainage, the public housing, the hospital, the jury selection, the zoning.

[00:03:47]You're a black man, you wanted to open a business, you had to get a permit.

[00:03:51]You had to go to that white man. Okay?

[00:03:55]Um and people couldn't vote.

[00:03:58]They couldn't remove the sheriff who was crooked.

[00:04:01]They were getting terrorized by the same sheriff and couldn't vote him out.

[00:04:05]They couldn't remove the school board that purposely redirected money that should go to the black schools because it and they they put it to the white schools. And these I'm talking about tax dollars from the black community. Black money going to fund white schools.

[00:04:20]You see? They don't tell you that part.

[00:04:21]That's what civil rights was really about. It was about where our money was going. So if you all don't want to give us our money, we going to go sit in y'all's schools or you white schools. We going to force y'all to let us sit in there unless y'all give us our money.

[00:04:33]And the white folks said, well, the rich white people said, well, we rather just uh let the we'll we'll let the poor we'll let the blacks and the poor whites mingle together. We'll send our kids to private school. They just threw the poor white people under the bus. That's how they really feel.

[00:04:48]But um you know, anyway, uh this is the point people miss. Voting wasn't just about choosing a president every four years. Voting was about local power. It was about tax dollars. It was about who got a school, who got a hospital, who got paved roads, who got police protection, who got a fair trial, who got public employment, who got ignored. And that connects directly to the tax issue. Black people were paying into the system, but they were locked out of the controlling the system.

[00:05:16]We were we our money went to to in in the public budgets, but but but our votes suppressed so they so we couldn't decide how the money was spent.

[00:05:26]Okay? We were governed without consent.

[00:05:28]We were taxed without equal representation. We were forced to live under uh uh policies that had no meaningful power to change. And that's why uh the civil rights movement focused so heavily on voting and and that's why Selma, Alabama mattered.

[00:05:44]That's why people marched across Edmund Pettus Bridge. That's why we dealt with the Bloody Sunday that the shock the nation. These people were taking our money and not giving us representation.

[00:05:56]Okay? This was not about us wanting to sit up next You think it has any Have any of us ever fought to go sit next to white people? If you are not If you don't see a bunch of black people fighting to get into uh the damn uh country and western uh uh concert You we are We was not We were not doing that. We wanted our money to be spent on our schools. We want our money to be spent on our roads and our infrastructure. The white folks would take our tax dollars and spend it on themselves. So, they got our money and their money and we and didn't spend any of it give us a few pennies out of our own money.

[00:06:34]How would that make you feel?

[00:06:36]Huh?

[00:06:37]But, anyway, uh so, you had civil rights ordinary black people were were beaten by state troopers for this because we demanded the right to vote.

[00:06:47]And 5 months later on August 6th, 1965, LBJ, Lyndon Baines Johnson, he signed the Voting Rights Act.

[00:06:54]And that law was very specific. The Voting Rights Act was passed to enforce the 15th Amendment. It authorized the federal intervention where states and local governments were denying uh black folks the right to vote or anybody on the race base of their race because it allowed the federal uh examiners and federal oversight because Congress understood some some states couldn't be trusted. Those same states, Texas, Alabama, Louisiana, it's Mississippi, etc. So, when people talk about the Voting Rights Act, they need to understand that it was built to confront what it was built to confront.

[00:07:30]Uh it was built to confront state-sponsored racial exclusion. It was built to confront local governments that took black money, took our money, and then denied us uh political power to determine where it should go.

[00:07:44]It it it it it it was built to confront counties where black people had huge percentages of the population, but had little to no representation representation because the election system was rigged against us based on our color. And that's why the Supreme Court ruling is so serious because when you weaken the Voting Rights Act, you're not just changing the election, you're weakening one of the main tools that black people used or did use at that time uh to challenge the same uh kind of political exclusion that defined this this this whole Jim Crow era.