Quote:

“So they harassed me so they come out there and near about arrest me every day sometime they would arrest me and put me in Jail… Say I run a stop sign, that I had a taillight wasn’t right, just anything, you know, to lock me up” (Hall 20.)

 

Comment:

            This quote is pulled from page 20 of Gregory Hunter’s interview with James Hall. During this section of the interview Hall is discussing the experiences he had as a black man in Sylvester during the 1950s. At the time Hall was one of very few men who owned property in the south and was also was the president of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People or NAACP. This placed him in a position that many white people of the time did not like. Hall explains that he would often be thrown in jail under false pretenses and was the victim of many hate crimes during this time.

            As I was reading this quote I could not help but think of how it related to what is going on today within our electoral process. Though voter suppression is not as blatant as burning a cross on someone’s farm land or throwing someone in jail for a broken break light, it still has very similar intentions. Both acts are meant to suppress others to allow those in power to remain in power. Much, if not all, of voter suppression is executed within the boundaries of our democratic laws. However, it still keeps thousands away from exercising their right to vote in elections. By operating under the law suppressors are able to justify their actions, just as officers in the 1950s justified incarceration with minor crimes.

            After making this connection, I couldn’t help but start to wonder if things like this happened in other nations around the world. Though I would not say that I am greatly educated in global politics, I had a hunch that it did. I took the liberty to do a bit of research around the topic of voter suppression and found my hunch was in fact correct. Voters are kept from the polls in many of the worlds superpowers. Nations such as Canada, Australia, Israel, and the United Kingdom are all known to have reports of voter suppression. Learning this information made me begin to question if such suppression is truly imbedded in us as humans? Will a group of power always try to suppress the “other” to remain in power? This is something that I would look forward to discussing in class.

           

Question:

In your opinion, do you think history will look back on our current elections that consist of voter suppression and see it in the same light as we see Jim Crow laws and behaviors today?