Political Quotes

“Mr. President, in the fall of 1868, recently freed African-American men participated in Federal elections for the first time in American history. According to Ron Chernow's biography of Ulysses S. Grant, the impacts of expanding the vote were immediate and dramatic. In a startling reversal for an area once dominated by slavery, the elections spawned black sheriffs, school board members, state legislators, and congressmen. That yesterday's slave laborer was today's state legislator horrified many white southerners who refused to accept this extraordinary inversion of their bygone world. Naturally, the opponents of voting rights had an answer. Chernow continues: [T]o circumvent the fifteenth amendment, white politicians in Georgia [and other states] devised new methods of stripping blacks of voting rights, including poll taxes, onerous registration requirements-- Let me repeat that quote. [O]nerous registration requirements, and similar restrictions copied in other states. Many attempts were made by this very body to stop these sinister laws, but the result was ultimately a failure. By 1877, ``the black community in the South steadily lost ground until a rigid apartheid separated the races completely, a terrible state of affairs that would not be fixed until the rise of the civil rights movement after World War II.'' Today, the U.S.…”