A.G. Gancarski
“The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.” — William Faulkner
The “Celebrating 50 Years: Voting Rights Act 1965-2015” event, held Thursday afternoon at the Jacksonville Public Library, proved interesting for reasons other than those intended.
It was notable to see who made the long walk across Hemming Plaza toward City Hall. Republican City Councilmen Sam Newby, Aaron Bowman, and Jim Love were all there, along with Republican Mayor Lenny Curry. So was might-as-well-be-Republican Reggie Gaffney and Democrat Katrina Brown.
The crowd reacted variously. A man in the back, unprompted, called out the provocative question, “Have we progressed from 1965 to now?” Murmurs stirred through the onlookers, and in most cases, questions like that asked by interlopers would be ignored in media reports.
However, throughout the event, a leit motif emerged: namely, the convergence of the distant past and the present.
Angela Spears, billed in the program as the “Special Assistant for Community Engagement for the former Mayor Alvin Brown,” was “Mistress of Ceremonies.” She told a story about a 90-year-old sorority sister of hers, who was Hattiesburg, Miss., in August 1965, when the VRA was enacted.
Her husband, a stalwart in the local NAACP, and she “thought they’d have the right to vote.” They did not. They sued.
Months passed, then the Ku Klux Klan exacted its terrorist revenge.
They burned down the couple’s store, then bombed their home one night. Fire raged in their hallway. They jumped out the window.
The wife? Still alive to vote, again and again, for the past half century.
The husband? A human sacrifice; a casualty of injuries incurred from the bombing and the escape of his burning home.
That wasn’t all the history on display.
Marcella Washington of Florida State College at Jacksonville gave a presentation on Voting Rights Act history. She spoke of Josiah Walls, an African-American elected to Congress as a Republican in 1870.
He was the last African-American elected to Congress from Florida until 1992.
Washington spoke of how Southern Democrats disenfranchised African-Americans, including by instituting a White Primary in the 1920s.
Then, a joke. About how now Republicans are the ones restricting voting rights.
All the while, a few Republican city councilmen sat there listening in the first few rows, as did Curry, somewhat farther back in the crowd.
Washington’s history lesson veered then into the local. She discussed how in 1967, “two black women were elected to the City Council,” Mary Singleton and Sallye Mathis.
“The first women ever.”
Sounds nice. But Washington delivered a kicker.
“Black males were [considered to be] threatening,” she said, “so black women were presented as candidates.”
Thereafter, a video played, in which the various honorees gave brief remarks.
The most interesting remark was, of course, from Congresswoman Brown.
“It wasn’t out of the goodness of anybody’s heart,” she said, that she was able to get elected in 1992.
It was because she sued for four minority-access seats.
What’s that, Mr. Faulkner? The past is not dead?
Her quotes in the Orlando Sentinel from Thursday, in which she announced yet another lawsuit to protect minority-access districts, proved illustrative.
“Florida has 27 seats: Why is the attack always on the one district that puts communities together and [gives] the African-Americans, who have suffered, an opportunity to have a representative?” she said.
“This [redistricting effort] is about me. But this [lawsuit] is not about me. What happens if I die today or tomorrow? I want somebody who looks like me, an African-American” in Congress.
Those remarks were not at all dissimilar to what she told Florida Politics earlier this week.
“Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act still stands,” Brown had said of the 1965 legislation that established the concept of “communities of interest.”
With that in mind, she asserted that downtown Jacksonville has more in common with downtown Orlando, for example, than with rural areas in North Florida.
Referring to previous discussions regarding district boundaries, Brown contended that “people from North Florida [have told her that] they do not want to be with Jacksonville.”
“Don’t tell me nothing about what the district looks like,” she said, adding that it’s “about having someone at the table looking out for you.”
The proposed iteration of Brown’s district does not seem automatically antithetical to her goal of giving “the African-Americans, who have suffered, the opportunity to have a representative.”
Though not a majority African-American district, African-Americans have a plurality and are 48.5 percent of the population, including those who self-identify as Hispanic-Black.
Political map analyst Matthew Isbell, too, thinks it looks good for her too.
“Brown will be favored in this district. The seat is heavily Democratic and 66 percent of the registered Democrats are African-American. Fifty-five percent of the Democrats in the district come from Duval, which is actually less than in the League of Women’s Voters’ proposed map. Leon, down at 25 percent of Democratic voters, has little chance of influencing the district.”
The district, as redrawn, has a 5-to-2 ratio of Ds to Rs. Brown lost a big chunk of CD 5, but she’ll hold the seat as long as she wants it.
That’s what makes the latest lawsuit from the congresswoman so hard to understand. Unless you consider the latest remapping of the district to be an independent issue from the Civil Rights struggles of prior years, decades, and ultimately, centuries. Struggles that did have a body count.
Brown choosing the anniversary of the Voting Rights Act to file a suit is no coincidence. To quote Faulkner again, from Light in August: “Memory believes but knowing remembers.”
