William J. Barber II

Alabama Voices

Since Trump’s electoral victory last November, Americans concerned about his rhetoric and policy have focused attention on Russian hacking as the source of this tumultuous moment in American politics. No doubt, it would be reassuring to pin responsibility for an unstable White House on a Kremlin conspiracy. But whatever the role Russians played in the 2016 election, homegrown extremism has been a part of America’s story for a long time. Fifty-two years ago, at the height of the civil rights movement in Selma, exposed voter suppression as the source of America’s political extremism.

I was invited to Selma this past weekend to help lead the commemoration of “Bloody Sunday.” But I had to walk out of Sunday’s service in protest of Secretary of State John Merrill because the witness of those who came to Selma before me would not allow anything less.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., along with many others who worked to dramatize the extremism of voter suppression in the South, knew that the reconstruction of democracy could not be complete until the vote was secured. Nearly a century earlier, the 15th amendment had been the crowning achievement of America’s First Reconstruction. “Slavery is not abolished,” Frederick Douglass noted succinctly, “until the black man has the right to vote.”

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The architects of Jim Crow in the South understood this fundamental political reality as clearly as Douglass and King. They developed poll taxes, literacy tests, and dozens of other voter suppression tactics with the explicit intent of disenfranchising African-American voters not on the basis of race, which the 15th amendment forbade, but on some other pretext. For decades Southern extremists defended these laws, not with the violence of the Klan but with the courteous and respectable arguments of lawyers and politicians.

The whole point of 1965’s Selma campaign was to expose the extreme violence beneath the courteous veneer of Southern politicians’ voter suppression tactics. When Brown Chapel AME became a field hospital for citizens whose skulls were cracked open on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the world saw clearly the violence of Alabama's political extremism. Less than five months later, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act with bipartisan support.

When I spoke in Brown Chapel on Sunday morning, I said our history demands we confront the hypocrisy of those who claim to honor the martyr’s of Selma while working against the political power they fought to secure. When Secretary Merrill stood in the pulpit after me and touted the voter suppression bill he sponsored in the Alabama statehouse, I could not stay silent. I understand that my action, along with those of dozens who joined me by walking out in protest, disrupted the decorum of a service. But the blood of Selma’s martyr’s would not let us sit quietly.

Voting rights advocates who were sitting in that sanctuary on Sunday morning have been fighting Merrill in court for the past five years. The Brennan Center has documented how, since a diverse coalition elected President Obama in 2008, 22 states have passed voter suppression measures. Many of these laws, including the one Merrill sponsored, implement a modern-day poll tax designed to suppress the vote of young people and people of color by requiring a voter ID.

Courteous Southern gentlemen like Merrill insist that a photo ID requirement isn’t meant to discriminate, but to guarantee the integrity of elections. Five years before President Trump made his baseless claim that 3 to 5 million people voting illegally in the 2016 election, Merrill argued on the Alabama house floor that a photo ID requirement was needed to “preserve the credibility and the integrity of the electoral process.” In five years of federal court cases, no one has been able to produce credible evidence of mass voter fraud to justify these barriers to the franchise.

Still, John Merrill’s lie, repeated in statehouses across America, created the conditions in which extremism has flourished. After the Supreme Court’s Shelby decision in 2013, which nullified the preclearance requirements of the Voting Rights Act, the lie of “voter fraud” became justification for dozens of other voter suppression tactics, which the Department of Justice was no longer able to prevent from going into effect. These tactics, including the photo ID Merrill continues to defend, have been struck down by federal courts. Nevertheless, politicians elected while these laws were in place hold power — not only in the White House, but in the Congress and dozens of our state houses.

Long before any Russian agents meddled in America’s elections, men like Merrill started working in Southern statehouses to subvert democracy. I am a pastor who took vows to proclaim the truth. I could not sit silently in church while the blood of Selma’s martyr’s cried out against Merrill’s hypocrisy and lies.

America must resist the temptation to seek a source for our extremism elsewhere. Voter suppression has hacked of our democracy, and it is rooted in a long history of white supremacy. Anyone who wants to honor the sacrifice of “Bloody Sunday” must expose the lie of voter fraud, even if it means disrupting the decorum of polite political culture. Exposing the root of extremism is what Selma’s campaign for democracy has always been about.

The Rev. William Barber II is president of Repairers of the Breach and author of "The Third Reconstruction."