With the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, great change was promised. 60 years on, that promise remains an empty one for millions of americans. While Voting rights and the integrity of American elections have been a constant and exhausting part of the national dialogue in recent years, few of these debates have dealt with the shadowy creep of the disenfranchisement of persons living with prior felony convictions.
In this episode, we use critical race theory to historicize this phenomenon, exploring its origins in slavery and the reconstruction era. We consider the connection of voting rights and power to the wider project of hyper-incarceration and consequent “civil death” of black communities in this country. We will hear from those directly impacted by these controversial laws and policies. Their reflections force us to confront uncomfortable truths about the precarity of black citizenship in the American experience and how the fight will be waged moving forward.
Featuring
Dr. Desmond Meade
President, Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC) & Chair, Floridians for a Fair Democracy
“Voting is such an important piece of citizenship and it’s such an important piece of personhood”
Professor Kerrel Murray
Associate Professor of Law and Milton Handler Fellow, Columbia Law School
“It’s important, or at least I would like people to understand themselves as having a role in understanding what the Constitution means. And that could include, for example, deciding that it’s just not constitutionally acceptable to have felon disenfranchisement laws have the effect that they [do] today. And you don’t necessarily need a court to agree with you on that, right?”
Juan Moreno Haines
Editor-in-Chief, Solitary Watch & Award-winning journalist incarcerated at San Quentin Prison
“As a democracy, we say, okay, you went to prison and now you’re out. Well, you still can’t vote. You still can’t participate in democracy. But that same person pays taxes. The same person goes to work every day. That same person raises a family.”
Dante Jones
Journalist incarcerated at San Quentin Prison
“Slavery is still good business in America”
“Laws in 48 U.S. states ban people with felony convictions from voting. In 2024, an estimated 4 million Americans, representing 1.7% of the voting-age population, [were] ineligible to vote due to these laws”
– The Sentencing Project
The racist roots of denying incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people the right to vote
“In 1787, the Constitution considered Black people as three-fifths of a human being. Blacks voting was not an issue. Then came the Civil War and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Enslaving people, except as punishment for a crime, was illegal. Birthright U.S. citizenship was established, explicitly including freed enslaved people. Black men got the right to vote. Over 2,000 Black men were elected to government offices, and they began purchasing or homesteading property and voting.
America responded. The exception in the 13th Amendment allowing slavery as punishment for a crime was paired with “Black Codes,” which basically criminalized Black life. Blacks convicted under Black Code laws were leased out to do work, providing cheap labor to boost the South’s faltering economy. In 1850, 2% of prisoners in Alabama were non-white. By 1870, it was 74%. At least 90% of the “leased” prison laborers were Black.
In the 15 years between 1865 and 1880, at least 13 states — more than a third of the country’s 38 states — enacted broad felony disenfranchisement laws. The theory was simple — convict them of crimes, strip away the right to vote, imprison them, and lease them out as convict labor and Blacks would be returned to a condition as close to slavery as possible.”
Civil Rights Era
The Selma to Montgomery marches were a series of civil rights marches which led to the passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This video contains excerpts from the marches and Martin Luther King Jrs. famous concluding address delivered in Montgomery, Alabama on March 21 1965.
The signing of the Voting Rights Act (1965)
President Lyndon B. Johnson made history signing the Voting Rights Act (1965) into effect, see his historic address here.
The case study of Florida
Florida led the nation in disenfranchisement of its citizens, with effectively permanent disenfranchisement for persons with felony convictions. Restoration of these rights relies upon payment of outstanding fines, pleas to the governor for clemency and furnishing of supporting documentation, which returning citizens became eligible to apply for several years after their release. In practical terms, this amounted to lifetime disenfranchisement for over 1.6 million citizens and 21% of the state’s total black voting-age population.
Source: The Brennan Center, Florida: An Outlier in Denying Voting Rights (2022)
Above: Supporters of Florida Rights Restoration Coalition pictured, source: FRRC.
MSNBC reports on the outcome of the citizens initiative in Florida, 2:30:00 – 3:10:00. Copyright MSNBC.
On November 6, 2018, nearly 65 percent of Florida voters approved Amendment 4, the citizens initiative led by Dr. Desmond Meade, which proposed a constitutional amendment that automatically restored voting rights to as many as 1.4 million Floridians, except those convicted of murder or a felony sexual offense, who had completed the terms of their sentence including parole or probation.
The Continuing Fight
“While many U.S. states have scaled back their disenfranchisement provisions, a trend that has accelerated since 2017, the United States still lags behind most of the world in protecting the right to vote for people with criminal convictions”
The Sentencing Project, Human Rights Watch & ACLU, Out of Step: U.S. Policy on Voting Rights in Global Perspective (2024)
Creative Revolt at San Quentin
This year inmates at San Quentin took a stand and cast ballots in a mock election with stakes unlike any other, the abolition of forced servitude in California’s prisons (“Proposition 6”).
Story reported by the Guardian.
Handwritten “ballot” from incarcerated participant in mock election at San Quentin. Photograph: Mount Tamalpais College
“The crisis of mass past incarceration has ravaged our communities, destabilized families and exacerbated generational trauma… a criminal legal system that disproportionately criminalizes black and brown folks and denies us our basic dignity and humanity, [is] a precise and coordinated and targeted assault on our voting rights that is meant to exclude these very communities from participating in our democracy.”
– Massachusetts Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley
Watch Congresswoman Pressleys full speech unveiling H.R.6643 – Inclusive Democracy Act of 2023.
Resources
Angel E. Sanchez, Esq., “Florida’s Bad Faith Prosecutions of Good Faith Voters” 41 Yale L. & Pol’y Rev. 334 (2023).
Cherrie Bucknor and Alan Barber “The Price We Pay: Economic Costs of Barriers to Employment for Former Prisoners and People Convicted of Felonies” Center for Economic and Policy Research (June 2016)
Christina Beeler, Symposium, “Felony Disenfranchisement Laws: Paying and Re-paying a Debt to Society” 21 U. Pa. J. Const. L. 1071 (2019)
Joseph A. Coll, “Racial Stereotypes, Racial Threat, and Support for Felon Disenfranchisement Among White Americans” Political research Quarterly (2024)
David J. Zeitlin, Note, “Revisiting Richardson v. Ramirez: The Constitutional Bounds of Ex-Felon Disenfranchisement” 70 Ala. L. Rev. 259 (2018).
Desmond Meade & Neil Volz, The Our Voice Podcast.
Florida Rights Restoration Coalition.
Felon Voting Rights, National Conference of State Legislatures, accessed December 19, 2024
M.E. Rivera & S.D. Gaskins “Previous Conditions of Servitude: A Fifteenth Amendment Challenge to Ex-Felon Disenfranchisement Laws” 1 Geo. JL & Mod. Critical Race Persp.153 (2009).
Credits
Production
Written, edited and produced by Teresa Singh, Jordina Rust, Eden Esemuede and Reynaldo Wilson with support from Mika’il Deveaux.
Legal Materials, Articles, Books
Christopher Muller, “Freedom and convict leasing in the postbellum south.” American Journal of Sociology 124.2 (2018) 367-405.
Christopher Uggen, Ryan Larson, Sarah Shannon, Robert Stewart and Molly Hauf, Locked Out 2024: Four Million Denied Voting Rights Due to a Felony Conviction, The Sentencing Project (October 10, 2024)
Davidson, Chandler. “The voting rights act: A brief history.” Controversies in Minority Voting 7 (1992).
Dudley, Rachel E. “From 1965 to 2023: How Allen v. Milligan Upheld the Voting Rights Act but Failed to Adapt to the Age of Computers.” Loy. U. Chi. LJ 55 (2023) 737.
Eric Holder & Sam Koppelman, Our Unfinished March, 47-63, 107-126 (2022)
Horace F. Whittaker Jr., Critical Race Theory & Voter Suppression, B.A.L.L.S. Publishing, LLC, (2021)
Jeffery Robinson, The Racist Roots of Denying Incarcerated People Their Right to Vote, The Guardian (May 3 2019)
Juan Moreno Haines & Sam Levin, Incarcerated Californians can’t vote. A prison held an election anyway, The Guardian (Oct 20 2024).
Results: California Proposition 6 Election Results: Involuntary Labour By the Incarcerated, New York Times (2024)
Sam Levin & Agency, California voters reject measure to ban forced prison labor, The Guardian (Nov 11 2024)
The Brennan Center, Florida: An Outlier in Denying Voting Rights (2016)
The Brennan Center, Racism & Felony Disenfranchisement: An Intertwined History (2017)
The Brennan Center, Restoring the Right to Vote (2019)
The Brennan Center, Litigation to Protect Amendment 4 in Florida (2019)
The Sentencing Project, Human Rights Watch & ACLU, Out of Step: U.S. Policy on Voting Rights in Global Perspective (2024)
Video
DemocracyNow!, “Rare Video Footage of Historic Alabama 1965 Civil Rights Marches, MLK’s Famous Montgomery Speech” Youtube, published Feb. 26 2013, authorized with Creative Commons Licence
MSNBC, Florida Votes to Restore Voting Rights for Felons, MSNBC, accessed December 19, 2024
Audio
Blue Dot Sessions, “Dire Ghost” 00:23- 00:28
“Presidential Economic Address” CSPAN Archive, 00:23
CBS News Miami, ‘Vote Them Out!’ March For Our Lives Attendees Chant Youtube, published online March 24 2018, 00:33
Blue Dot Sessions “Dust Digger“, 00:50 – 01:24; 02:04- 02:13; 43:49- 47:07
Ayanna Pressley, Peter Welch Unveil Inclusive Democracy Act to End Felony Disenfranchisement Youtube, 0:27:00, 43:17, published online Dec 7 2023
Blue Dot Sessions, “Cold and Hard“, 02:58- 03:23; 03:48- 05:18; 05:47- 07:18; 08:10- 08:24
BBC Archive, “Marine Bugle Call” , 0:09:49
BBC Archive, “Army – Soldiers marching past on gravel. (Ragged marching, troops wearing studded boots.)” 0:09:54
BBC Archive, “Calisson – music clip” 12:48- 13:42; 13:47- 14:04; 20:30- 20:50; 22:38- 24:23
DemocracyNow!, “Rep. John Lewis, Civil Rights Icon, on the Struggle to Win, and Now Protect, Voting Rights in U.S.” Youtube, `16:37, 17:46, published online July 5 2013, authorized with Creative Commons Licence
DemocracyNow!, “Rare Video Footage of Historic Alabama 1965 Civil Rights Marches, MLK’s Famous Montgomery Speech” Youtube, 18:12, published Feb. 26 2013, authorized with Creative Commons Licence
American History TV, Voting Rights Act of 1965 Speech and Bill Signing, 19:34, CSPAN Archive
MSNBC, “Florida votes to restore voting rights for felons” 30:36, published online Nov 7 2018
Blue Dot Sessions, “Transition music – Borough”. 00:24:50- 00:25:00
Blue Dot Sessions, “Transition music – Firelight Child”
KCRA 3 “Proposition 6 fails | California voters reject ban on forced prison labor” Youtube, published online Nov 12 2024