Daily Kos - Despite the scathing 143-page evisceration of Texas' strict new voter ID law by District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos, the Supreme Court gave the go-ahead for that law to be implemented for this election cycle. That Estimates are that as many as 600,000 eligible Texans don't have one of the four IDs accepted as a requirement for casting a ballot: a driver's license, a military identity card, a passport or a gun license.
This isn't the first voter-suppression rodeo in Texas.
Keeping African Americans away from the polls began as soon as Emancipation was announced on Juneteenth (June 19), 1865. The state refused to grant blacks political rights. And a year later, the all-white constitutional convention voted against giving suffrage to blacks, even those who were literate or who had never been slaves. That was followed by the all-white legislature refusing to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment and passage of the first Black Codes that constrained African Americans from certain economic pursuits, racial intermarriage, officeholding, jury service and, of course, voting.
But, the Republican convention of 1867 included black delegates, and, even though the Ku Klux Klan and other purveyors of anti-black violence were viciously active, blacks participated in their first statewide vote in 1868, voting in a referendum to hold another constitutional convention. With their white allies, they won that referendum. The convention affirmed some basic rights for African Americans, although not all that they had fought for, and made readmission of Texas to the Union possible in 1870. From then it was downhill.
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