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| 28/10/04 |
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“I am convinced… that the black vote is going to be not only a bigger vote than ever before, it is the swing vote.” Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr., speaking on CNN Rev. Jackson is right about the raw numbers of African Americans who are expected to go to the polls on November 2. However, most of the national Black voting population will “swing” neither their home states nor the presidential election. Fifty-five percent of the Black population resides in the South, and every four years their votes are drowned in a sea of Republican red. For presidential election purposes, except for the besieged Black citizens of Florida, the southern African American franchise is negated by the Electoral College – a true 21st century vestige of slavery. The whites of the Old Confederacy – once Democrats, then rebels against the Union, then Democrats again, and now mostly Republicans – practice racial bloc voting to keep Black minorities – ranging from 16 percent (Arkansas) to 36 percent (Mississippi) – in political check within state boundaries. But it is the Electoral College that chains Black southern voters to their white political antagonists, in effect forcing Blacks to add the weight of their franchise to that of the Republican Party’s racist base, every four years. We vote against their candidate – they walk away with the southern half of Black America’s electoral votes. No Americans are more adversely affected than Blacks by the profoundly undemocratic workings of the Electoral College, the rich white man’s arrangement hatched in the backrooms of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, in Philadelphia. The same Convention enshrined slavery as untouchable by the new national government for 20 years, and designated slaves as three-fifths men for the purposes of awarding representation in Congress. Slave masters were made more powerful than other white men by exercising the franchise that was denied the slave. To read the entire piece go to |
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