Texas disenfranchises Black and Brown voters

Aug. 17 – Requiring poll taxes, property ownership and literacy tests to vote may be long gone, but today’s tactics are just as filled with the blatant racism that has historically underlined attempts to disenfranchise African Americans and other voters of color in this country.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott and his Republican-dominated legislature have decided to ignore the historic 1965 Voting Rights Act. On July 9, after Trump declared he deserved to have five more seats in Texas, Abbott obliged by calling a special legislative session to do just that.

The Texas House drew up a bill that provided gerrymandered districts, which ignited an outrage among not only legislators but the general public in major cities like Dallas, Houston and San Antonio. A two-week quorum break by Texas House Democrats had Abbott threatening their arrests  by Texas State Troopers, who have no jurisdiction outside of Texas, huge fines and impeachment if the disappeared legislators could be found.

As the first special session ended on Aug. 14, the missing representatives listed their conditions for their return to the chamber and signaled their intention to participate in the state’s second special session beginning Aug. 15.

Thousands flood capitol

On Aug. 16,  over 6,000 people flooded the Texas capitol grounds to protest and rally against the redistricting maps. Speakers included 95-year-old labor activist Dolores Huerta and Democrats Texas Congress member Greg Casar and former U.S. Rep. “Beto” O’Rourke.   

O’ Rourke told the Austin crowd the push by Republicans to “gerrymander” in several states comes from fear of retaliation, saying, “If they cannot maintain their purchase on power in the U.S. House of Representatives, then there will be a check on their lawlessness, accountability for their crimes and corruption.” (KUT Radio)

If a change in control of the House after the 2026 midterms happens, there is a possibility Trump could be impeached.

Erosion of voter rights

In numerous news stories reporting on the racist Texas redistricting plot to discount Black and Brown votes by redrawing congressional boundaries, the blame is not only put on Trump and his allies, but on the U.S. Supreme Court and Chief Justice John Roberts.

In rulings over several years, this court has effectively rolled back hard-won laws that had for decades protected the right to vote. On Aug. 10, journalist Adam Liptak wrote a news analysis for the New York Times that began: “If Republicans succeed in pulling off an aggressively partisan gerrymander of congressional districts in Texas, they will owe the Supreme Court a debt of gratitude.

“In the two decades Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has led the Supreme Court, the justices have reshaped American elections not just by letting state lawmakers like those in Texas draw voting maps warped by politics but also by gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and amplifying the role of money in politics.”

In a New York Times Op-ed on Aug. 14, David Daley, author of “Antidemocratic: Inside the Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections,”  wrote: “Chief Justice Roberts has pursued the patient, steady bleeding of the Voting Rights Act. In 2013, he wrote the 5-to-4 decision in Shelby County v. Holder that effectively ended preclearance, the Voting Rights Act’s most effective enforcement mechanism, and liberated states, many clustered in the South, from federal oversight of legislative maps.”

August 6 marked the 60th anniversary of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, when then-President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the act into law witnessed by a group of people, including the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This was at a time when Texas elections were defined by segregation and discriminatory voting practices. The history of struggle by African Americans to simply exercise their democratic right to vote is painful, bloody and violent.

Efforts to register Black voters in the 1960s swelled into a movement with national support after Freedom Summer in 1964, when the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality organized registration drives in Mississippi in the face of violent attacks. 

On March 7, 1965, Civil Rights activists attempting to march from Selma to

Montgomery were brutally beaten by Alabama state troopers and local police when they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. This brutal violence was seen on television around the country.

Anyone who watched the news could see Black people, mainly in Mississippi and Alabama, getting beaten with bricks, children taken down by powerful fire hoses and peaceful people being trampled by horses. This was done by law enforcement as well as Klansmen and other racist individuals.

The struggle continues

In the 1960s, the horror Black people endured was nightly news, just like today, with so much graphic depiction on television of the genocide in Gaza. Ashley Farmer, associate professor of African and African Diaspora Studies and History at University of Texas Austin, told the Texas Standard that seeing the brutality that African Americans endured “transformed Americans’ understandings of the brutality Black people face in order to even exercise the right to vote and the fact that we were fundamentally not operating in a democracy if we were going to such great lengths to keep them from voting.

Farmer cautioned:  “We need vigilance to confront new forms of voter suppression. Although the central idea is the same, it looks different in 2025 than it did in 1965.” 

So, while Texans can carry guns and can even buy ammo in the same convenience store they go to for bread or milk, Texans’ votes are gerrymandered so they do not count. People should be able to choose their political leaders, but today politicians are picking their voters.

The struggle for real democracy and the right to vote by people of color is continuous.