Rosanell Eaton was talking to her daughter at home in Louisburg, North Carolina, not long ago when she suddenly lowered her voice and looked strangely deflated. “You know, all of this is coming back around before I could get in the ground,” she said. “I was hoping I would be dead before I’d have to see all this again.”



She was referring to the turbulent years of her childhood growing up in the 1920s and 1930s in the Jim Crow south. She went to a segregated school, drank water from a fountain marked “blacks” in the town square. Her family’s plot of tobacco and cotton fields was, according to her daughter, the only land in the neighbourhood owned by African Americans and, tiny though it was, bitterly resented by white neighbours. More than once she woke up to the sight of charred crosses in the yard.

One day, the slide truck on which they loaded the tobacco they harvested was scattered in broken pieces across the front lawn. Another time, the shed that her mother had put up beside the road to shelter the kids from the sun as they waited for the school bus was riddled with bullet holes.

And then there was the day in 1939 when Rosanell turned 18 and gained the right to vote. She was a vibrant young woman, eager to learn and engage with the world, and determined to have her electoral say at the first chance. But when she arrived at Franklin County courthouse, she was met by three white officials.

“What are you here for, young lady?” one of them asked.

“I’m here to register to vote,” she said.

The men looked at each other, then back at her. “Stand in front of us,” she was instructed. “Look directly at us. Don’t turn your head to the right, nor to the left. Now repeat the preamble to the constitution of the United States.”

It was a common ruse at the time, one of several that electoral officials used to deprive black people of the vote. Aspiring black voters would be asked to count beans in a barrel, or name their state’s entire congressional delegation. If they couldn’t, they were turned away. But Eaton just stood there and recited from memory the preamble to the US constitution, without a glitch.

“Well, little lady,” one of the officials conceded. “You did it.”

Rosanell Eaton is now 93. To her consternation, she finds herself once again facing an obstacle that she believes is designed, just as it was 75 years ago, to disenfranchise her and her fellow black North Carolinians. In July 2013 the state’s Republican-controlled general assembly pushed through HB 589, a law that in several ways makes it more difficult for those who are young, older, poor and, especially, African American to participate in the democratic process.

Eaton is a plaintiff in a challenge to the new law that will be heard on Thursday by the fourth US circuit court of appeals in Charlotte, North Carolina. The case, in which the plaintiffs are seeking an injunction to block the law’s implementation ahead of a full trial next year, is being watched intensely by both sides of the political divide, as it will determine the rules under which the midterm elections will be fought in a key swing state with a closely fought Senate battle, between sitting Democratic senator Kay Hagan and one of the Republican architects of HB 589, Thom Tillis.

In court documents the plaintiffs – including the NAACP, represented by the Advancement Project, and the League of Women Voters, represented by the ACLU – set out the various ways in which the new law, HB 589, throws obstacles in the path of potential voters. It reduces the number of early voting days; imposes a requirement, to go into effect in 2016, that voters show photo ID cards at the polls; eliminates the ability to register to vote and then cast a ballot on the same day; invalidates any ballot cast by an individual outside her or his precinct; encourages strangers to challenge the eligibility of people standing in line to vote; and scraps a program to pre-register teenagers ahead of their 18th birthdays.

The outcome of the appeal could have nationwide ramifications: were the new voter ID law to be allowed to stand it could become a template for conservative reforms across the country ahead of the 2016 presidential race.

Reverend William Barber, president of the state chapter of the NAACP, sees the voting changes as part of a clear political strategy by southern Republicans. The benefit that Republicans stand to gain by potentially making it harder for black North Carolinians to vote can be seen in the 2012 presidential election. Black voters cast almost a quarter of the total ballots in the state and supported Obama, according to exit polls, by a whopping 96% to 4%. (Despite that, the Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, still took the state by a narrow 50% to 48%.)

Barber also sees the manner in which HB 589 was passed as suggestive of motive. He notes that an expanded version of HB 589 was rushed through the general assembly in the final two days of the legislative session and passed both chambers on 25 July, a month to the day after the US supreme court knocked down key parts of the Voting Rights Act that for almost 50 years had served as a federal block on discriminatory ambitions in a group of largely southern states.

Armenta and Rosanell Eaton. Photograph: Nick Pironio

“They moved to pass the worst voter suppression bill since Jim Crow,” Barber said. “We know this is the fight for the nation. They are using North Carolina as the first post-Shelby test, and it is our job to make sure they don’t get away with it.”

The plaintiffs’ challenge to the law was rejected in August by a federal district court. If the appeal is to succeed, the plaintiffs must convince the three justices hearing it that under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act the new provisions are unlawful as they would result “in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color”.

In court filings the NAACP and the US Department of Justice, which is playing a supporting role in the legal action, set out why the reduction of early voting days under HB 589 from 17 to 10 days will act as a burden in November that will fall disproportionately heavily on African Americans. In 2008 and 2012 – two years that saw higher than usual African American turnout in the state due to excitement about the prospect of the election, and then the re-election, of America’s first black president – more than 700,000 black North Carolinians voted before election day. That was equivalent to about 70% of all African American voters in the state, compared to 51% of white voters.

In 2012, during the seven days of early voting ended by HB 589, a total of 900,000 North Carolinians of all races voted, representing about 35% of all votes cast. Break it down by race, and 28% of African Americans who voted in 2012 did so in the now-eliminated seven days compared with 17% of white voters.

Part of the reason for the disparity, the plaintiffs will argue in court, is that poverty levels are higher among African Americans, which makes it more difficult for them to get to the polls within the allotted 12 hours on election day. Almost one in three poor black residents in the state have no access to a car compared with one in 10 poor whites, and many black workers are paid by the hour so that a decision to take time off work to vote literally comes at a price.

There is also a cultural factor. In its legal memo supporting the legal challenge, the Department of Justice argues that many black people use early voting because they have lingering fears from the days of segregation that someone will try and trick them out of their vote. Getting to the polls ahead of election day “gives them confidence they will have time to overcome such obstacles”.

As in many other states, particularly in the south, African American churches in North Carolina have developed a tradition of driving their congregants to the polling stations on the Sundays before election day. Known as “souls to the polls”, the occasion has not only become an important part of the communal calendar, but also a crucial way of helping older black voters to take advantage of their rights.

Cutting the first week of early voting, as the law now does, will eradicate one “souls to the polls” on Sunday. Pastor Jimmie Hawkins of North Carolina’s only African American Presbyterian church, the Covenant Presbyterian church in Durham, who testified in earlier court hearings against the new law, says that the whittling down of “souls to the polls” has already hit morale among his members hard.

Pastor Jimmy Hawkins. Photograph: Nick Pironio

“People right now are very dispirited. They ask themselves why is this happening to them now, how did we go from a progressive state to a regressive state, from a community with some of the most positive voting rules, to a political leadership that is doing away with all that and attacking our voting rights.”

Of the 220 regular attendants of his church, Hawkins says that almost half are senior citizens who grew up in a segregated state. “They know the impact of being denied their voting rights,” he said. “They know what happens when you aren’t able to elect people to represent you and how that affects the laws and policies of the land.

“The legislators don’t realize – or maybe they don’t care – about the emotional and psychological impact of the moves they are making. They are dividing this state, and hurting people. I’ve come strongly to believe that if you can convince someone they are less than others, then they are going to live less than, think less than.”

In their submission to the appeals court, the state of North Carolina, led by Republican governor Pat McCrory, argues that the proposed changes are “neutral” and framed to ensure “uniformity and fair treatment of all voters”. The state insists that HB 589 “did not have the effect of burdening and decreasing voter participation”.

“If everyone has an equal chance to register to vote,” the brief says, “but fewer members of minority groups choose to register, then it cannot reasonably be said that those persons have ‘less opportunity’ to vote. In this example, these individuals simply failed to take advantage of the opportunity.”

The state denies that there is any racial or partisan intention behind the new law. Officials insist it will reduce the cost of elections while also reducing fraud at the ballot box. As McCrory put it soon after he enacted the legislation: “Protecting the integrity of every vote is one of the most important duties I have as governor of this great state. And that’s why I signed this common sense legislation into law.”

Eaton at a demonstration.

But statistics compiled by the state’s own board of elections show that out of a total of 32 million votes cast at the ballot box in general elections between 2000 and 2012, only two fraudulent in-person votes were recorded.

In its defence, the state points to the 6 May primary election in North Carolina as evidence that the voting reforms have not harmed minority participation. Turnout on that day, it emphasises in its legal argument, was higher – including among African Americans – than in the equivalent primary in 2010.

But the NAACP says that using primary election turnout as a marker is “grossly misleading”. The May primary was unrepresentative because turnout was less than 16% and limited largely to “the most committed partisans who are less likely to be affected by electoral changes”, it argues.

The NAACP and its fellow plaintiffs also fish out statistics that underline the disproportionate burden on black voters of the new restrictions. HB 589 ends out-of-precinct voting – the system whereby voters can cast a provisional ballot in a precinct other than the one where they are registered – and black residents are twice as likely to vote out of precinct in North Carolina than white residents. The law also eliminates same-day registration for voting, something African Americans do at double the rate of white people. Similarly, the rate of early voting among black voters is about 140% that of white voters.

The most contentious single element of HB 589 – the demand that voters must show a current photo identification card at the polls – will not come into effect until the presidential election in 2016. But this November it is being given a “soft rollout” in which poll workers will be required to ask voters whether they have such identification available.

Rosanell Eaton is one of those who could have difficulties under the new voter-ID rules. She does have a birth certificate, a driver’s license and a voter registration card, but the names on each of them conflict. She is variously Rosa Nell Johnson, Rosa Johnson Eaton or Rosanell Eaton. It is not clear whether the inconsistency would trip her up at the polling station under the new legislation, which states that a driver’s license counts as valid identification. But given the possibility of confusion over her name, combined with her own personal history of Jim Crow, she is anxious, as she put it to her daughter, that “all of this is coming back around”.

Rosanell Eaton at the state assembly.

“In her lifetime, she’s seen an improvement in the way we were treated in this community,” said her daughter Armenta Eaton, speaking in her mother’s home in Louisburg. “But now she sees a regression back to the bad old days. It’s more sophisticated now, but she understands there’s racism involved, mean-spiritedness, and it bothers her that others can’t see that.”

Given her age, Rosanell speaks rarely in public these days. One of those occasions was last June, just as HB 589 was being rushed through the state assembly. When she heard that there was to be a peaceful demonstration at the legislative building in Raleigh as part of a series of protests branded as “Moral Mondays”, she insisted on joining it, and was duly arrested – aged 92.

Rev Barber remembers Eaton arriving at the steps of the building leaning on her walking frame. “Rosanell, you don’t have to do this you know,” Barber said to her.

“I know what I have to do,” she replied, shoving her walker away and striding ahead unaided. She led the crowd, about 100 people, into the building and then addressed them, telling them the story of her childhood experiences under segregation.

“She said, ‘I’m fired up and I’m fed up,’” Barber recalled. “When she spoke that day it broke something in the crowd. A 92-year-old woman who had fought these battles long ago was now having to fight them all over again.”