Pictured are President Joe Biden and the Rev Al Sharpton of the National Action Network
Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com Tel: (216) 659-0473. Email: editor@clevelandurbannews.com.By Kathy Wray Coleman, editor-in-chief, associate publisher
NEW YORK-President Joe Biden, a longtime former U.S. senator from Delaware who served as vice president under former president Barack Obama for eight years and chose a Black woman in Vice President Kamala Harris as his running mate on his presidential ticket, is blasting Republicans as backsliding into the days of Jim Crow in the wake of laws passed by Republican-dominated state legislatures like in Georgia that critics say are designed to suppress the Black vote and further oppress Black people.
"The cry for justice 400 years in the making is ringing out across our nation," Biden said during a convention event on Zoom sponsored by the New-York based National Action Network, which is led by Civil Rights icon and talented MSNBC political host and commentator the Rev. Al Sharpton.
The president said the country is "backsliding into the days of Jim Crow, passing laws that harken back to the era of poll taxes when Black people were made to guess how many beans, how many jelly beans, in a jar or count the number of bubbles in a bar of soap before they could cast their ballot."
Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States. These laws were enacted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by white Southern Democrat-dominated state legislatures to disenfranchise and remove political and economic gains made by black people during the Reconstruction period. Jim Crow laws were enforced until 1965.
President Biden says that both state and federal laws on voting, including Supreme Court rulings that weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and laws that push gerrymandering against the Black community, are disenfranchising Blacks and compromising the Black vote.
Democrats control the Senate, the House of Representatives and the White House, giving the president a more useful forum to push for public policy changes more aligned with the Democratic agenda.
CNN reported that last month, Biden called a sweeping Georgia elections bill that imposes new voting restrictions "Jim Crow in the 21st Century" and "an atrocity."
The president says the restrictions disproportionately target Black voters, who were crucial to the recent Democratic victories in Georgia and are a significant voting bloc nationwide.
According to CNN, Georgia's new law imposes new voter identification requirements for absentee ballots, limits the use of ballot drop boxes, makes it a crime for anyone other than poll workers to approach voters in line to give them food and water and gives state officials more power over local elections.
Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com Tel: (216) 659-0473. Email: editor@clevelandurbannews.com.
