Does Hakeem Jeffries Not Know What Jim Crow Was?

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]Ladies and gentlemen, Hakeem Jeffries thinks we have a Confederate Supreme Court.

[00:00:04]>> We know this unprecedented assault on black political representation, the likes of which we have not seen since the Jim Crow era.

[00:00:15]The ghosts of the Confederacy has afflicted the United States Supreme Court majority and is invading and haunting the nation right now.

[00:00:27]>> I'm Rich Lowry of National Review and that is plainly ridiculous. In this video, I want to dig into why cuz we've heard a lot of this kind of rhetoric from Democrats saying this is taking us back to the end of Reconstruction or the Jim Crow era. So, I want to talk a little bit about Reconstruction, how it ended, what happened afterwards, and how that bears no relation to what we're seeing from the Supreme Court now.

[00:00:48]Jeffries actually goes further than some others in saying the Supreme Court is a Confederate-like institution. The Confederacy was devoted to enslaving black people and cleaving off slave states from the rest of the union to make a separate slave-based nation. And if the Supreme Court says, "You know what? Actually, under the Constitution, we can't use race to draw congressional lines." That equals the Confederacy? It is absurd. It's too absurd for words. It makes no sense whatsoever. But again, this rhetoric is very prevalent. Let's go to a couple more examples and then we'll dig in to the substance. Here's Ro Khanna. Mr. Speaker, the Supreme Court is engaged in an ugly recidivism to deny black political representation in the black in the South.

[00:01:37]Not since 1877 when Rutherford Hayes ended Reconstruction, have we seen as fast a rollback of political rights for black Americans. The moral light has been extinguished from the Supreme Court.

[00:01:52]>> And here's Cory Booker on Meet the Press. And what they have done right now is sent us backwards in time, back to the 1870 1870s and 80s where the South and Southern legislators through terrorism, intimidation, and worse were able to stop African-Americans from having representation in Congress. And how can we forget Gavin Newsom? Who's Gavin Newsom? It's just Jim Crow 2.0.

[00:02:17]It's sick. Stone-cold racism in a scale I never thought I'd see in my lifetime, never have seen in my lifetime. It's all happening, bring us back to a pre-1960s world. It's jaw-dropping what's happening.

[00:02:28]>> So let's get into this with some facts and details. The kind of thing that people pushing these narratives can't abide. But we're going to do it here. We all know what reconstruction was, correct? Period after the Civil War, we have the Reconstruction Amendments, 13th, 14th, 15th, abolition of slavery, guaranteeing black rights, there's an attempt to rebuild the South, to reintegrate it into the Union, and to guarantee the rights of blacks. There's violent resistance to this, you get federal troops, and eventually this breaks down. The North becomes exhausted, you have the so-called Compromise of 1877 that brings Reconstruction to an end. So initially after the end of Reconstruction, we see increased voter fraud in black areas where white supremacist Democrats are carrying out this fraud to undermine black political power. You see blacks being chiseled out of local offices they held or in-runs being done around these offices or blacks actually being intimidated into leaving them. There's a black tax collector in 1883 in Yazoo City in Mississippi who's lynched. We see a new legal regime with strict anti-vagrancy laws or disproportionate penalties to petty theft to try to get as many blacks in jail as possible, and then you get this prison labor that is lent out to planters and other commercial concerns in effect a return to the slave system. And remember, this is what Democrats say the Supreme Court is favoring right now. This kind of thing in the post-reconstruction area era. Then you get violence against blacks is not punished. You get anti-KKK laws repealed. So all this is horrific.

[00:04:18]Then around the turn of the century you see the proliferation of these most notorious vote suppression tactics, poll taxes, literacy tests. They're supposed to be race-neutral, but obviously they are intended to disenfranchise blacks and they are selectively enforced. And unfortunately, they work and we can see the evidence. This isn't a matter of hyperbole or speculation. Here's a quick little passage from a history of the era. Everywhere the number of black voters plummeted. There were 130,000 registered black voters in Louisiana in 1896. By 1904, there were 1,300. Black voters in Alabama dropped from 180,000 to 3,000 during the same period. In Virginia in 1904, no blacks voted at all. Do we see anything like that today?

[00:05:06]Is that what the Supreme Court is blessing today? No, of course not. Black turnout in this country is quite robust.

[00:05:12]In 2012, it actually exceeded white turnout. Now Barack Obama was on the ballot, but no one is suppressing black votes. Now, how about race neutrality?

[00:05:22]Cuz some people on the left will say, "Oh, well, the Supreme Court or Republicans pretend to be race-neutral now, but the segregationists pretended to be race-neutral back then." Well, two rejoinders to that. One, they weren't as a matter of fact race-neutral. Two, they were pretty explicit about it. Just one example, the motto of the Alabama Democratic Party was white supremacy and they actually printed it on the top of ballots until 1966.

[00:05:50]Now, it's true that gerrymandering was one of the tools that white Democrats used in the 19th century for their nefarious purposes, but it's so ironic.

[00:06:01]You look at one of the most notorious examples in Mississippi. I believe it was the sixth sixth district that the legislature drew in 1882 after the end of reconstruction. It was called the shoestring district cuz what did they do? They drew a majority minority district that just scooped up a bunch of black voters randomly in a 250 mile long district. Who else had a shoestring district? Louisianna. This is exactly what they did when they drew their second minority minority district. Made no geographic sense whatsoever. It's just randomly scooping up black voters to keep them in one district and that's the district that the Supreme Court struck down. Now, the deeper irony, of course, is that Democrats now are opposed to the principle of colorblindness, the principle that animated the opponents of Jim Crow 100 years ago. You'll see Democrats often, last couple weeks, saying the Supreme Court today is like the Plessy court referring to the notorious Plessy v.

[00:07:08]Ferguson decision, which blessed this idea of separate but equal. But there was one dissenter. One dissenter in that case who had the foresight to understand how profoundly wrong it was, Justice Harlan. And there's an amazing passage in there that's worth quoting.

[00:07:28]In the view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior dominant ruling class of citizens. There's no caste here. Our Constitution is colorblind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect to civil rights. All citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved. It is therefore to be regretted that this high tribunal, the final expositor of the fundamental law of the land, has reached the conclusion that it is competent for a state to regulate the enjoyment by citizens of their civil rights solely upon the basis of race. Wow, that is powerful stuff.

[00:08:15]And who does that sound like? It sounds like Clarence Thomas. It sounds like the current majority on the court that says, "No, we can't make public policy on the basis of race." That rejects racialism and that insists, "Yes, the Constitution is color-blind." And it is so lunatic that Democrats have managed somehow to reverse all this and say the Supreme Court has to be in favor of racialism in order to be an instrument of justice. Unfortunately, there is much more where that came from.

[00:08:48]Hey, do yourself a favor, comment, like, or subscribe. I guarantee you won't regret it. I'm Rich Lowry, over and out.