GOVERNMENT WATCH
Dyer could get competition in mayoral race
October 25, 2007
ORLANDO - A member of Orange County's Soil and Water Conservation District board announced his intention to run for mayor of Orlando late Monday.
Tim Adams -- who ran against the incumbent mayor, Buddy Dyer, in a race for state Senate in 1992 -- said in his announcement that he wants the community venues put to a public vote, and he opposes the ban on feeding the homeless at Lake Eola Park that was enacted by the Dyer administration.
Adams would seem a long-shot candidate, with the Jan. 29 election just three months away. Dyer had raised more than $350,000 in campaign contributions as of Sept. 30, reports show. Adams said he supported businessman Ken Mulvaney in the past mayoral election. Mulvaney also has said he might run again, but neither he nor Adams has yet filed papers to formally launch a candidacy.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
BLACK in ORLANDO, SM
BIAS Busters of Florida, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana, SM
And Community Enlightenment Organization, SM,
A New Offensive to Deprive African American Democratic Voters; Of their Right to Choose their Leaders in Official Public Elective Offices, Such as Mayor of Orlando, and City of Orlando District Two Elections.
Allegations of voter intimidation surrounding the Florida Department of Law Enforcement's investigation into the Orlando mayoral election in 2003 Produced new Knowledge of How Politics Work, or
How Politics Does NOT Work equitably, nor uniformly in Orlando, Florida.
The March 2003 election, you'll recall, was marred by allegations that:
A Grand Jury indictment charged that : The Dyer Campaign enticed Ezzie Thomas – a consultant, whom Buddy Dyer personally approved money for; and paid more than $10,000, in order to manipulate the absentee ballots of older, Black Citizens - voters in the Mayor’s Race of 2003 illegally.
Buddy Dyer pleaded no contest, admitting guilt, in that case; in order to stay out of jail after Buddy Dyer’s Arrest, and definite admission of involvement. Of course David Dix was involved in that scheme as well.
Dyer's former and 2007- 08 challenger, Ken Mulvaney, challenged the election results, saying that Thomas' alleged chicanery boosted Dyer to victory, with the illegally obtained tainted votes.
The Unlawful 2003 Election was won with those Court- Marked illegal tainted votes!
Now an Equally Unethical Court Action has landed the Same Set of Culprits back in Power over the City of Orlando With an ILLEGAL, Unethical Election Process that Prevented the Only African American Who EVER Won More than 131,000 Votes from European Descent and all other ethnic
Group Voters the Right to Seek the Office of MAYOR of ORLANDO under the FALSE, MISLEADING and Racially Inspired False Claim By Buddy Dyer and his Crony that the African American Candidate Tim Adams Did Not Live the in the city of Orlando Long Enough in 2007.
The Judge in the Case also is and was a FRIEND and Church Attendee with the Attorney MAY ANN DOWNS, and a Close Personal Friend and Campaign Worker with Scott Gabrielson, wh0 served as the Judge’s Own CAMPAIGN MANAGER for JUDGE and SCOTT the JUDGE’S Wife’s Campaign as well!
In the State of Florida, those are Grounds for CRIMINAL MISCONDUCT!
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement FDLE opened an investigation, to see if Thomas illegally pressured absentee African American voters to vote for Dyer in 2003;
And to determine if Dyer had violated a city ordinance that at that time; limited the amount of absentee ballots one person can pick up and deliver. The Law has been changed recently, and Thomas is helping Dyer Again in 2007 and 2008 for the Elections absentee Votes.
Later, in 2003, the FDLE, ** added to its investigation charges that firefighters illegally campaigned for Dyer on the taxpayers' PAID time.
{** Often Dubbed as the Florida Department of SELECTIVE Law Enforcement]
Those allegations were presented before a grand jury.
Ken Mulvaney filed a lawsuit to have the election overturned.
Thomas' attorney, Joe Egan, who also represents the firefighters' union, says Thomas was innocent, and the charges were politically motivated.
For months, he pitched the claim to local reporters –
[Slug included], – that:
“This was a GOP scheme to disenfranchise Blacks”.
On July 25, 2003, the Orlando Sentinel ran a story citing African American voters who made Statements that: they in fact were;
“Intimidated by FDLE agents”, alongside Thomas' claim that the
“FDLE – which reports to the Sitting Governor at any time;
– was going door-to-door in African American precincts, in an attempt to pressure voters into staying home”.
The Sentinel's editorial board opined that the FDLE should be more sensitive, but the inquiry should continue.
And that was that.
Now in the Elections of 2008, a “White Man only” - Primary is being enforced by Buddy Dyer and his Henchmen and Women in Orlando’s Mayoral Elections. This is being done at the Expense of the taxpayers of the City of Orlando, Florida to Benefit One Man: John H. Dyer.
In 2003 Bob Herbert, urban affairs op-ed man for The New York Times Wrote Extensively about Voter Suppression in Orlando, Florida.
In his Aug. 16 2003 column, "Suppress the Vote," Herbert wrote,
"State police officers have gone into the homes of elderly Black voters in Orlando, Florida, and interrogated them as part of an odd 'investigation' that has frightened many voters, clearly intimidated elderly volunteers, and thrown a chill over efforts to get out the Black vote in November of 2003."
……………………………………………………………………………….
Herbert, the Columnist for the New York Times, then compared the investigation to pre-civil rights days, when whites would do anything to keep blacks from the polls.
The next day, Herbert's New York Times colleague, Paul Krugman, repeated the insinuation.
"[T]he state has provided little information about the investigation, and, as Mr. Herbert says, this looks remarkably like an attempt to intimidate voters."
And then it was reported widely that: liberals everywhere were raised to heightened interest in this state of affairs.
The story quickly made its way to National Public Radio and to talk network Air America.
The Organization; “People for the American Way “, repeated Herbert's allegations in a fund-raising e-mail.
On Aug. 16, 2003, Rep. Corrine Brown declared her anger in a press release: "I am outraged to hear that The Florida Department of Law Enforcement officers are intimidating elderly members of Orlando's African American community.
“... If they are going to investigate anything, they should be examining the Florida governor's office [rather] than intimidating elderly people who are merely trying to express their right to vote."
On Aug. 19, Brown and five other Black House Democrats demanded that the U.S. Department of Justice investigate the FDLE for civil-rights violations, which generated a new round of press.
The Situation rolled on.
The next day, Aug. 20, Herbert followed up his original piece, declaring,
"The smell of voter suppression coming out of Florida is getting stronger."
He mentioned a May 13 letter the FDLE sent to Dyer saying "that there was no basis to support the allegations ...."
And then, on Aug. 23, Herbert of the New York News, made this proposition:
"Why go forward (with the investigation) anyway?
Well, consider that the prolonged investigation dovetails exquisitely with that crucial but unspoken mission of the GOP in Florida: to keep Black voter turnout as low as possible."
It's a fantastic event: “Armed GOP Gestapo canvassing Black neighborhoods to make sure Dubya Got –elected”.
Too bad it's all HAPPENING again, in 2007, and 2008, also;
This Time its Unethical Lawyer “Buddies” for Dyer who are the Dirty Culprits that are engaging in illegal tactics that are Making it Difficult to Seat an African American Air Force Veteran, and Community Educator; One candidate Who can Win the Mayor’s Job away from Buddy. In 2007, it is the Dyer Camp who is the ones that are now suppressing the Black Vote, in doing so.
The Dyer Buddies’ actions in 2007 have many African American Voters So Outraged that many wills not vote this year in the United States – Wide Presidential Primaries; and that will hurt the Entire Democratic Party!
The FDLE made it clear that the May 13 2003, letter, in 2003, that New York Columnist Herbert referred to, that the letter only spoke to Dyer's involvement, not to the bigger issues of ballot fraud or illegal campaigning. The Investigation in 2003 was halted after several indictments were made and filed in courts against Dyer and Others.
Local press accounts made it clear that Dyers’ involvement may have been through Patty Sharp and Others who had Buddy’s Approval.
Apparently, Herbert never bothered to read them.
FDLE officers are in fact "interrogating" poor, elderly Blacks, because those are the exact same people whose votes Thomas allegedly mishandled.
During the Previous Buddy Dyer Indictments; One Reporter Queried: “Should the FDLE be knocking on doors in nearly Lily – White Windermere to investigate vote fraud in Black neighborhoods? Probably not.
Yes, FDLE agents carry handguns – they're cops.
Yes, the agents could have covered them with suit jackets, but who wears a suit jacket outside in a Florida summer?
Of course the FDLE isn't talking about the ongoing investigation; that's against the law.
The FDLE, according to then Commissioner Guy Tunnell, offered to share tape recordings of the interviews with Herbert when the case was closed, but Herbert said he wasn't interested.
Is this really part of an effort to disenfranchise the Black vote?
Heck Yes to the Inth Degree!
Call Mulvaney – whose allegations kick-started the investigation – a close loser, but as anyone who followed the campaign knows, he's not just a GOP tool.
Then there's the fact that the allegations were initially referred to the FDLE by Orange-Osceola state attorney Lawson Lamar – a Democrat – whose office recently impaneled a grand jury to weigh the FDLE's evidence.
There may well be an effort in Florida to disenfranchise Black voters.
There are faulty electronic voting machines that don't generate paper trails.
There is a deeply flawed felon purge list that the state refused to reveal until forced, and only then did it come to light that – lo and behold – there was nary a Hispanic name on it. However, many thousands of African American remained on that purged List.
Blacks in this state lean heavily to voting Democratic.
Hispanics lean heavily to voting Republican.
The state scrapped the list. UNDER PRESSURE!
Central Florida Voters Congress, SM Quotes may be made with Permission and Credit for Source @ Giftsearch10@aol.com
The disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of Florida voters in the 2000 presidential election evoked deep-felt anger, especially among African Americans who only a few decades ago had to fight to win the right to vote in Florida and other Southern states.
With its tourist attractions, retirement communities and beachside resorts, Florida is rarely identified today with the “Deep South” and the legacy of racial oppression and violence with which states such as Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia are associated.
But for nearly three quarters of a century Florida's African American citizens were denied the right to vote by Jim Crow laws and the murderous activities of the;
Ku Klux Klan and other racist organizations.
A review of this history—a subject avoided by the news media throughout the election crisis—helps shed light on the magnitude of the attack on democratic rights that was carried out in the November and December elections of the years 2000, and also in Orlando Florida in 2008, during the Mayor and District Two City Council Unethical - action Elections.
Between 1880 and 1910 Florida adopted literacy tests, property qualifications, “grandfather clauses” (which permitted an individual to vote only if his grandfather had, thereby excluding the descendants of slaves) and other measures to disenfranchise African American voters.
In 1889, the Florida legislature enacted the first poll tax in the South, a measure that would not be repealed until 1938.
Florida was also among the first states to adopt a multiple ballot box law, which required voters to place eight separate ballots in eight separate ballot boxes.
This measure was designed to take advantage of the high rates of illiteracy among the state's African American residents—officially 40 percent in 1900—who had difficulty placing the right ballot in the correct ballot box.
Florida's current, 2008 mostly lifetime ban on voting by convicted felons—which disenfranchised nearly a third of all African American males during the 2000 elections—dates back to the RACIALLY reactionary measures implemented in the late nineteenth century.
At the time the state's vagrancy laws and convict lease system—under which prison laborers were rented out to private contractors—allowed the authorities to jail African Americans and poor whites on the flimsiest of charges, and strip them of their constitutional rights.
Local election officials even used the secret ballot law to take advantage of high illiteracy among African Americans.
Under the guise of protecting the integrity of the ballot, the state of Florida barred anyone from providing assistance to a voter even if he could not read.
According to Professor Darryl Paulson of the University of South Florida, these measures were brutally effective. In the presidential election of 1888, prior to the passage of the disenfranchising laws, 75 percent of adult male Floridians voted.
By the time of the 1892 presidential election, with the voting barriers in place, only 39 percent of adult males voted.
African American male turnout fell from 62 percent in 1888 to 11 percent in 1892.
One measure of the reaction that dominated Florida politics for nearly a century is the fact that Josiah Walls—a former slave and Union soldier, who was elected as Florida's first African American member of the US Congress in 1870—would be the state's only African American US congressman until November 1992.
Although African Americans made up anywhere from 10, (i. e. Yes, Ten to Fifty Percent ) to 50 percent of the state's population within this time frame, it would also take a century after the post-Civil War Reconstruction period for another African American to serve in the Florida state legislature.
In 1902, the Florida Democratic Party adopted a
“White primary” policy, which excluded African Americans from voting to nominate Democratic candidates for general elections.
Given the Democrats' ascendancy in the “one-party” South, this meant African Americans were excluded from participating in the only elections that mattered.
Such laws, which defined political parties as private clubs that had the right to exclude certain classes of people from voting, were adopted throughout the South.
Even after the Supreme Court struck down Texas's white-only primary in 1944, the Florida legislature passed a law giving political parties inherent powers to restrict membership and in many counties African Americans continued to be barred from joining the Democratic Party or participating in its primary elections.
If African Americans found ways to overcome the array of legal obstacles to voting, state officials blocked the counting of their votes.
One such method of vote fraud, for which Florida was notorious, was the use of tissue ballots and undersized ballots called “little jokers.”
Election officials in areas with large African American populations would stuff the ballot boxes so there would be more ballots than eligible voters.
Officials would then eliminate the number of ballots equal to the excess by removing the tissue ballots and “little jokers” that had been given to African American voters.
Alongside racist legal measures, the disenfranchisement of African Americans was enforced through violence and terror.
From 1900 to the 1930s Florida had the highest per capita rate of lynching in the South: 4.5 lynchings for every 10,000 African Americans.
Also: Equaling Forty Five Lynchings per every one hundred Thousand African Americans!
And this was during the Time of the start of the second World WAR, in which our fathers and Uncles served
With their lives to protect AMERICA!
This rate in Florida; was twice the rate of lynchings in Mississippi, Georgia and Louisiana, and three times that of Alabama.
From 1921 to 1946 there were 61 reported lynchings in Florida—twice as many as in Alabama, and topped only by Mississippi (88) and Georgia (68).
During the 1920s white mobs carried out pogroms in Ocoee, near Orlando, and Perry, Florida, and Rosewood, Florida, near the Gulf Coast, burning homes and killing scores of African Americans.
Was anyone prosecuted for these crimes?
Was our Property Ever Returned to our Descendant FAMILIES?
The rampage in Ocoee began after an African American resident, shotgun in hand, demanded the right to vote.
The Honorable Mr. July PERRY!
In the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan wielded enormous influence within the national Democratic Party.
(Hmmmm; Where is Bill Clinton tonight?); Sheet in Hand.
In Florida and throughout the South the Democrats sought to maintain the support of white, small businessmen, farmers and laborers—who were being uprooted by the economic and social changes following World War I—on the basis of white supremacy and anti-African American demagogy.
In Florida, the real estate boom and the development of large-scale agriculture in the 1920s led to rising profits for land speculators, developers and agribusiness.
But tens of thousands of small farmers, particularly in the state's northern counties, faced ruin from low farm prices.
Basic social conditions, including rural diets, were no better in 1928 than they were in 1898.
During the Depression of the 1930s, while membership in the Klan fell throughout the US, in Florida the KKK continued to remain a force.
With a statewide membership of about 30,000, the Klan was active in Jacksonville, Miami, and the citrus belt from Orlando to Tampa. [And still is in 2008!]
In the orange groves of central Florida, Klansmen still operated in the old night-riding style, intimidating African Americans, who were and are now, trying to vote, or Seek to become MAYORS and other Elected Officials
In addition to terrorizing African Americans, the KKK targeted union organizers and any one else who assisted African Americans in exercising their United States Guaranteed Rights!
The business establishment was anxious to prevent common struggles by African American and white workers.
Moreover, some unions paid poll taxes for poor African American and white voters.
One of the most notorious Klan incidents in Florida history occurred in Tampa in 1935, when Joseph Shoemaker, a labor organizer, was flogged, castrated, and tarred and feathered, before dying of his injuries.
During a 1934 debate on a federal anti-lynching law, Florida Democratic Senator Claude Pepper—a moderate by Southern standards—blurted out the racist philosophy that lay behind the violent disenfranchisement of African American voters.
“Whatever may be written into the Constitution,” he said, “however many soldiers may be stationed about the ballot boxes of the Southland, the colored race will not vote, because in doing, so they endanger the supremacy of a race to which God has committed the destiny of a continent.”
The LIFE of Harry T. Moore
A pioneer and martyr in the struggle for African American voting rights during the 1930s and 1940s was Harry T. Moore, a Florida school teacher who became state leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
In 1944 Moore co-founded the
Progressive Voters League, which registered 100,000 new African American voters over the subsequent six years.
BIAS Busters of Florida, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana, SM
Present: BLACK in ORLANDO, SM
By 1951, due in large part to his efforts, 31 percent of all eligible African Americans in Florida were registered to vote, a rate that was 50 percent higher than any other Southern state.
On Christmas night, December 25, 1951, Moore and his wife Harriette were killed when a bomb planted under their bedroom exploded at their home in Mims, Florida, near Cape Canaveral.
Moore's life and murder were the subject of a recent Public Broadcasting System television documentary, Freedom Never Dies: the Story of Harry T. Moore.
Moore joined the NAACP in 1933 and began teaching elementary school students about the vote, even though the state's $3 poll tax and “white-only” primaries all but excluded African Americans from voting.
Moore saw the franchise as a weapon to remove officials who supported or were indifferent to the lynchings, mob violence and police brutality victimizing African Americans.
He also saw the vote as a means of winning equal pay for African American school teachers, equal funding for “colored” schools, and other social and civil rights.
Moore helped defeat efforts to reinstate a literacy test and maintain “white only” primaries on the county level, after the Florida Supreme Court struck down the practice.
In May 1945, for the first time ever, over 30,000 African Americans voted in the state's Democratic primary, in what Moore described as the “greatest political activity among Florida Negroes since Reconstruction.”
For his efforts, state and local officials branded him a “troublemaker” and “Negro organizer” and in 1946 the Brevard County School Board fired Moore after 20 years of service as a teacher.
In 1948, during the Truman administration, the Southern “Dixiecrat” wing of the Democrats rebelled against the national party's plan to adopt a moderate civil rights plank.
The Dixiecrats temporarily left the Democratic Party and formed the States' Rights Party, running South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond for president.
In a leaflet issued at the time, Harry Moore said, “In 1948, as in 1860, we find the nation again divided on the race question.
In 1860 it was called the slavery question. In 1948 it is called the question of civil rights.
But the fundamental issue is the same in both cases.
The basic question is this:
“Shall America continue to treat Negroes as slaves, inferior beings, and second-class citizens, or shall Negroes be treated as free human beings, with all the rights and privileges of full citizenship?”
When this question was raised at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia this year, the reaction was about the same as it was at the Democratic Convention in Charleston and Baltimore in 1860.
The reactionary ‘States' Rights' slave holders walked out in 1860, held another convention in Richmond, and nominated Breckinridge of Kentucky.
The reactionary Dixiecrats walked out again in 1948, journeyed to Birmingham, and nominated Thurmond of South Carolina.”
Moore was a vocal opponent of lynchings and;
Frame-ups, which were employed to terrorize increasingly restive African American workers, including many who returned from World War II determined to end the indignities of Jim Crow segregation and virtual peonage in the citrus groves, lumber and turpentine camps and other work locations.
Moore carried out his own investigations into such murders, including the drowning of a 15-year-old boy, who was tied up and forced to jump into the Suwanee River, in front of his father, because he had sent a Christmas card to a white girl.
The most celebrated case was that of the Groveland Four, which became known as;
“Florida's Little Scottsboro,” a reference to the infamous Alabama frame-up of the 1930s.
In July 1949, after four young men—including two returning soldiers—were accused of raping a white woman, white mobs burned down several African American-owned homes and shot up African American neighborhoods.
The police killed one youth in a manhunt and tortured three others, who were later convicted by an all-white jury, with two sentenced to death.
Moore's opposition to the frame-up pitted him against Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall, who was well known for his violence against striking fruit pickers, and connections to the KKK.
When Willis McCall, the Murderous Sheriff; ran for reelection in November 1948, 250 hooded Klansmen paraded in support of McCall and Dixiecrat presidential candidate Strom Thurmond, with the aim of frightening African American voters away from the polls.
After widespread national protests against the Groveland frame-up, the US Supreme Court ordered the retrial of two of the remaining defendants.
But on November 6, 1951, McCall shot the young men—killing one—while transporting them to a hearing. McCall claimed that they had tried to escape, but the surviving prisoner said McCall pulled the young men out of his patrol car and tried to execute them.
Moore's public demand for McCall's resignation was part of the widespread outrage that erupted throughout the nation following the shootings.
According to a 1999 biography by
Florida journalist Ben Green
(Before His Time: The Untold Story of Harry T. Moore, America's First Civil Rights Martyr),
……………. Moore's involvement in the Groveland case and efforts to register African American voters made him “the most hated African American man in Florida.”
Shortly before his murder, an NAACP associate warned Moore that a prominent white grove owner, CF Flake, the head of the Mims, (Florida) Citrus Exchange, had complained that Moore was “putting notions in niggers' heads” and “his head ought to be broken.”
The bombing of Moore's home in December 1951 was part of wave of KKK violence that became known as the Florida Terror.
[Terrorists in the 1950 are in Central Florida!]
Between August and December of that year, ( 1951) there were a dozen dynamitings, the targets including an African-American housing project, Jewish synagogues and Catholic churches in Miami, and, in Orlando, a new African American high school and white-owned ice cream parlor that served African Americans.
The anger of African American workers and their determination to avenge the murders were captured in the
“Ballad of Harry Moore” by African American poet Langston Hughes, which concludes with the verses:
….And this he says, our Harry Moore,
As from the grave he cries:
No bomb can kill the dreams I hold
For freedom never dies!
Freedom never dies, I say!
Freedom never dies!
(For the full text of the poem, see: http://www.nbbd.com/godo/moore/ballad.html)
Anxious to avoid further alienating the Dixiecrats, Democratic President Harry Truman did little to stop the racist violence.
As The Militant, one newspaper declared, on December 31, 1951:
“The Truman administration brings the full power and resources of the government to bear in its persecution of radical and minority political groups, but it is indifferent and pretends helplessness in the face of a widespread Ku Klux Klan conspiracy to beat, bomb and shoot the Negro people into submission and acceptance of second-class citizenship.”
The FBI, led by J. Edgar Hoover—a staunch opponent of civil rights—conducted an investigation of the Moore bombing, but dropped the case without any convictions.
To this day, accountability is still insufficient, for the murders.
The civil rights movement
The eruption of mass civil rights struggles throughout the South during the 1950s and 1960s led to the final dismantling of the Jim Crow system and the achievement of voting rights for African Americans.
In addition to Alabama, Mississippi and other states, Florida was an important battleground in the struggle.
In 1955, African Americans in Florida's state capital, Tallahassee, carried out a successful bus boycott, a year after a similar protest integrated public transport in Montgomery, Alabama.
Sit-ins and demonstrations, led by Florida A & M students, occurred in the capital during the early 1960s; protesters defied bombings, beatings and mass arrests to integrate public facilities in St. Augustine, where Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders were arrested in 1964; Including Several Students of Bethune-Cookman College, Led by the Student Government President, who is a resident, and Elected Official of Orlando, Florida. A Daytona Beach Bus Boycott was Organized by Bethune Cookman Professor Charles Cherry, who was educated at Morehouse College in Atlanta, and the Same Student Government President who led B-CC Students on the First Ever Daytona Band-shell and Beach Party for African American Students in 1963!
Also in Florida; African American sanitation workers waged a bitter four-month strike in St. Petersburg-Tampa in 1968, a part of Central Florida!
The latter struggle erupted into violence and coincided with the urban upheavals that spread across Florida, including Tampa, Saint Petersburg, and Central Florida Communities near Orlando; and throughout the U. S., after Dr. M. L. King's assassination in April 1968.
For the U. S. political establishment and its Cold War propaganda campaign, the violent suppression of civil rights in the South proved an international embarrassment.
Moreover, economic and demographic changes in the South had broken up the old sharecropping system and weakened the political base of the segregationists. In Florida, the massive migration of workers and retirees from the North, as well as the growing urbanization of the state, shifted political weight away from the rural northern and Panhandle counties, where the KKK and similar forces enjoyed most of their support.
In 1957 the Eisenhower administration proposed the extension of African American voting rights in the South.
The final bill, the first civil rights bill enacted since 1875, was trimmed to meet the opposition of Southern Democrats and lacked strong enforcement provisions.
But the Civil Rights Act of 1957 did create a Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department, authorized to prosecute registrars who obstructed the right of African Americans to vote.
The bill also established the United States Civil Rights Commission as an independent agency charged with gathering facts about voting rights violations and other civil rights infringements.
In 1964-65, the national exposure of the murders of civil rights workers registering African American voters in Mississippi and the violent attack by state troopers against voting rights marchers in Selma, Alabama spurred the Johnson administration to support the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The act prohibited several Southern states from using voting laws, practices or procedures, such as literacy tests and other devices, to discriminate against voters on the basis of race, color or their reading or writing knowledge of the English language.
The Act authorized the US Attorney to provide observers to register voters and monitor elections, and also required these states to submit any changes in their voting laws to the federal government for approval.
The passage of the law followed the adoption of the 24th Amendment to the US Constitution, which prohibited the use of poll taxes to deny voting rights.
By the early 1960s the registration rate among African American voters in Florida had risen to 35-40 percent. After the passage of the Voting Rights Act it increased to nearly 60 percent.
Throughout the South nearly one million new African American voters were added to voting rolls by 1970.
In 1975 Congress expanded the coverage of the Voting Rights Act to include political jurisdictions in Florida and other states with language minority groups, and required officials to furnish bilingual assistance to language minority citizens at all stages of the voting process and in all elections.
It is noteworthy that in the recent presidential elections many Haitian American and Hispanic voters; many of Whom are United States Military VETERANS of the United States Armed Services Branches; complained of being denied language assistance in the voting booth.
The 2000, and the 2008 elections in
Florida and its Major Cities
Florida in the year 2000 was vastly different from the Florida of the 1890s, the 1950s or even a decade ago.
The state, which in 1900 was one of the least populated in the US, is now the fourth largest, growing by 3 million, or 24 percent, since 1990.
According to the 2000 census, in the last decade more than one million Hispanics—mainly from Latin America—came to Florida, attracted by a large number of service jobs and the state's bilingual resources.
Florida is today highly urbanized, with 90 percent of the population living in cities along the coasts and large numbers of people moving up from the heavily populated southern counties to central and northern Florida.
The working class—made up of African American, white and immigrant workers—is the predominant work force in Florida, as it is throughout the US.
Given the lack of popular support for George W. Bush's reactionary social policies, the Republicans were able to install him in the White House only through the suppression of votes.
Republican officials, including President Bush's brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, and Secretary of State Katherine Harris—the millionaire heiress of a Florida Citrus tycoon—used their control over the state apparatus to obstruct likely Democratic voters from casting their ballots, or having them counted.
This culminated in the decision by the right-wing majority on the US Supreme Court to overturn a Florida high court ruling and stop a manual recount of votes.
In an astute comment made shortly after this decision, Evangeline Moore, the daughter of Harry T. Moore, said, “They killed my father, now they just throw out African American votes.”
This experience raises critical political questions.
In the 1950s and 1960s it was possible, despite the crippling effects of the civil rights movement's reliance on the Democratic Party, to win significant gains through mass protest struggles.
Today, no section of the political establishment is prepared to defend basic democratic rights, including the right to vote.
Democratic stalwart Jesse Jackson made a few protests at the time of the Florida vote controversy, but dropped them after criticisms by the Wall Street Journal and his wealthy financial backers. **
The Democratic Party as a whole put up no serious opposition to the hijacking of the election, and has since gone out of its way to proclaim the legitimacy of the Bush administration and collaborate in carrying out its right-wing agenda. ***
The defense of democratic rights has always been fundamentally a class question.
In the past, the disenfranchisement of African Americans in the South was aimed at preventing African American and white laborers and farmers from waging a common political struggle against the economic forces that oppressed them.
Today, America's ruling elite increasingly views the traditional forms of bourgeois democracy as an obstacle to its accumulation of wealth.
Community Enlightenment Organization, SM,
And
BIAS Busters of Florida, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana, SM
Present: BLACK in ORLANDO, SM
Giftsearch10@aol.com
Post a Comment