Black Code

• The law was justified by supporters as an effort to curb the city’s crime level, which includes one of the highest murder rates in the nation.
• Throughout U.S. history, I see three main periods of legislative disenfranchisement in which legislative bodies have voted to expel members.
• These events have been shown to be a form of “white backlash” working to keep Black officeholders out of power and their constituents powerless without representation.

Reconstruction and legislative disenfranchisement

• After the Civil War, the United States engaged in a brief period known as Reconstruction, which lasted from 1865 to 1877.
• The efforts included formally abolishing slavery nationwide, guaranteeing equal protection of the laws to everyone regardless of race, and allowing formerly enslaved people to vote.
• But after Tennessee politician Andrew Johnson, who had been Abraham Lincoln’s running mate in 1864, took office upon Lincoln’s assassination, many of those provisions of Reconstruction were reversed.
• Collectively, the legislative expulsion of the Black officials and the imposition of the Black Codes served to effectively disenfranchise the Black voters of Georgia.

The civil rights era

• Another major effort to disenfranchise Black Americans came during their next major push to achieve political, social and economic equality: the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
• Opponents targeted two prominent civil rights activists who had been elected to represent their communities: Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Julian Bond.
• A year later, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Bond’s First Amendment rights had been violated and ordered that he be seated.
• Bond ultimately served in the Georgia legislature for another two decades, before turning to teaching and activism.
• He was the first African American to be elected to Congress from New York and from any state in the Northeast.

Black Lives Matter movement

• In the aftermath of the George Floyd killing, a new social movement emerged across the United States.
• In May 2022, Tiara Young Hudson, a long-serving Black public defender, won the Democratic primary for a judgeship in Jefferson County, Alabama.
• Their alleged violation was participating in a protest against the legislature’s rules – but their real violation, I believe, was that they were Black, outspoken and pushed for change.