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Downloaded from YTS.MX
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- [Narrator] So why did your mom die?
- [Joanna] 'Cause she was black.
It was during segregation,
they didn't treat African Americans then.
They didn't have any black blood.
And if she hadn't been black, she wouldn't be dead
'cause they woulda had blood for the white people.
If we had the right to vote back then,
I think my mother would have lived
and I would have known her.
- [Narrator] To millions of Americans,
the long fought battle for voting rights
culminated on Bloody Sunday when 600 courageous marchers
were attacked by police on horseback
as tear gas and screams filled the air.
Selma, the Edmund Pettus Bridge,
forever ingrained in American history.
Monuments to a struggle.
Everyone can now vote.
So what happened?
What happened after Selma?
- Selma has been locked into the American imagination
as this place of voting rights strength.
But what gets missed is it freezes Selma in time.
And so you don't see what happened to Selma afterwards.
You don't see the massive white flight.
You don't see the shutting down of the businesses.
You don't see the massive unemployment.
You don't see the kind of economic despair
that has happened in Selma.
So yes, that power of the right to vote,
but that's not the fully story of Selma.
And that kind of resentment and retrenchment
that we see happening in Selma,
the decay that we see happening there.
You get a wealthy white area in Selma,
and then you get the rest of Selma.
That is so indicative of the United States
of America right now.
It looks like it's working.
I mean we see that we have elections,
we see that people go to the polls,
we see that people cast their ballots,
we see the kind of horse race
as the percentage of the votes are coming in
and they're tallying up,
and so it looks like it's all working.
But it's not.
- [Narrator] It's not working because,
like Selma, the right to vote has decayed over the years
through legislative maneuvering in order to disenfranchise
massive portions of the population.
The same population that was fighting
for those very rights all the way back in 1965.
The unspoken reality is that America
was always a country by white people for white people.
But as a nation that is becoming browner,
an existential threat to the established order.
It's also important to understand
that voter suppression is not driven by party,
it is driven by ideology.
And with the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act,
the Republican party saw a political opportunity that,
to its own detriment, couldn't resist.
- As the Republicans wooed the southern Democrats in,
what they thought they were doing
was getting additional representatives in the south
that could help them in Congress with the votes
to be able to push forward a conservative agenda.
Y'know, small government, et cetera.
But when you woo the toxin of white supremacy in,
it cannot be contained.
It is a virus, it is toxic, and it took over.
- [Narrator] The party of Lincoln
had a tenuous control of the south, at best.
That was enforced by the military during Reconstruction.
More than 1,500 African American men
held office throughout the south.
But the gains made after 247 years of slavery
would be nullified with the Compromise of 1877,
a backroom deal allowing Rutherford B. Hayes,
a Republican, to be president,
and for the removal of federal troops from the south,
ceding it back to the Democrats who, in turn,
starting with the 1890 Mississippi constitution,
would usher in Jim Crow and segregation.
The signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act,
and the Voting Rights Act of 1965
by a Democratic president caused a shift
in party allegiance among white voters
who felt their segregationist way of life was under attack.
The staunchly Democratic south would become Republican.
(birds chirping)
- [Joanne] All these stores were thrivin'.
We had Ben and Kay, we had Butler's Shoes,
we had Zales, we had all those chain stores was down here.
It was a thrivin' community.
This used to be a shoe store
and I had a bad experience in there
'cause I tried on shoes and didn't know it.
I wasn't supposed to try on shoes.
We were standin' in front of Carter's drug store,
it's still in Selma today, alive and well,
but at that time Carter's had a lunch counter.
And I wanted to sit there,
but my grandmother said I couldn't.
She said colored children, that's what we were called,
can't sit there at the counter, it's the law.
It didn't stop me from wanting to sit there.
Every time I pass by it, be peepin' in that window,
watchin' those white kids spinnin' around on those stools
and it looked like so much fun.
Well, one day my grandmother was talkin'
to one of her friends at front of the store
and I was doin' what I always do, peepin' that window,
wishin' it was me.
This particular day my grandmother noticed
and she leaned over my shoulder,
she pointed through the window to the counter,
she said when we get our freedom, you can do that too.
I became a freedom fighter that day.
- Voter suppression is not just a southern phenomenon.
It allows them a level of comfort,
some level of patting oneself on the back
to go oh, those southerners.
But this is nationwide.
It is doggone near from sea to shining sea.
We see it in Wisconsin, we see it in North Dakota,
we see it as well in Alabama, in Florida, in Texas.
We see it in Kansas, we see it in Ohio,
we see it in Michigan, we see it in Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania's not the south, Michigan is not the south.
Ohio is not the south.
- [Narrator] In fact, 33 states, 2/3 of the country,
have some form of voter suppression
under the guise of protecting the integrity of the vote.
But as history has shown,
voter suppression has never been about integrity,
but about preserving the right to vote
exclusively for whites.
Following the Civil War,
the 15th Amendment prohibited the barring
of anyone from the right to vote based on race,
color, or previous condition of servitude.
To get around that,
states used societally imposed conditions
instead of race as the litmus test to vote.
The poll tax and literacy test.
Newly freed African Americans had no money,
and only 3% could read or write.
And if that didn't work,
then there was always the tools of terror.
As Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo often stated,
the best way to keep an n-word from voting
was to visit him the night before.
By 1940, in places like Mississippi,
Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina,
more than half of the African American adults
had less than five years of formal education.
It's not too hard to imagine, then,
that only 3% of all black adults in the south
were eligible to vote.
Underfunding black education,
poverty, voter intimidation, and outright murder
had laid waste to the 15th Amendment.
In Selma, it resulted in less than 1%
of the African American population registered to vote
in a city that was over 50% black.
- [Joanne] And did you know that these streets,
you see the sidewalk?
And see how it's up and down?
Well, the white people walked up top,
black people walked on the bottom.
And those benches, that used to be the only place
in Selma that black people could sit.
All that was allowed.
They had nowhere to go to the bathroom.
That's a good question.
Voting rights, where are we with voting rights?
Man, that voting must be awfully valuable, I promise you,
'cause every time I turn around,
somebody tryin' to take somethin' from it.
Some people think that we had the right to vote,
everything would be, it was, after that was fine, right?
It wasn't.
Even after that, for every gain that we made,
we had to fight for it, even today.
So let's just get rid of that thought that,
and then we ended up African American president
and you know the world, the whole world has changed.
No.
- In that 2016 election,
black voter turnout had declined by 7%.
Now this was a close election.
And the narrative that we received
was y'know black people just didn't show up.
And you know why they didn't show up?
'Cause they just weren't feelin' Hillary.
Y'know, Hillary is uh, she's Hillary.
She doesn't have Obama's charisma,
she doesn't have his magic, she doesn't have his skills,
and she know she's Hillary.
So they just didn't show up.
Well, that's not quite accurate.
This was the first election in 50 years,
presidential election in 50 years
without the protections of the Voting Rights Act.
- [Narrator] To really understand this,
we have to go back to the 2000 election
between Al Gore and George W. Bush.
While the carnival atmosphere of Florida's hanging chads
dangle like a specter over the election results,
the real danger was lurking
nearly 800 miles away in St. Louis, Missouri.
It was there that Senator Kit Bond cried voter fraud
after Democrats protested the illegal purging
of nearly 50,000 registered voters.
It would become the rallying cry
that would plant the seed for massive voter suppression.
- So in this legislation,
with the reality of all that had happened
with machines that didn't work,
with intimidation and no place to complain,
this law was putting in place
ways to deal with that debacle, the reality of that debacle.
He added, Kit Bond insisted on adding the fiction
of voter fraud into federal law.
And that meant that now you had sitting in federal law
that states could require voter ID.
- Which was the poison pill. - Which was the poison pill.
- [Narrator] But voter ID would only be one
of many levers which a party could pull
to suppress the vote and change the results.
Combined with voter purging,
mass incarceration, gerrymandering,
and the closing and moving of polling locations,
this lethal cocktail would alter our democracy.
(birds chirping)
- [Joanne] When I look at some of these trees,
I just wish they could talk.
I can see my ancestors really strong up at these trees.
It's sad, this whole place,
this whole thing is makin' me sad.
Was this necessary?
When I say that, I mean,
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why did it take a war to make people realize
that we should be free?
People ask us why we livin' in the past,
that was then and this is now.
Okay, what's different?
I'm not in the street watchin',
I don't see much different.
We're fighting for the right to vote in then.
We were fighting for basic human rights then.
Aren't we still doin' the same thing now.
So don't tell me it was then.
It might be then for you,
but see I have not, if you progress, you forgot to take me.
- Barack Obama, a black man,
was elected president of the United States.
Now, one of the things that we hear,
because this was repeated at 2012,
one of the things we hear is how racist can America be?
We elected a black man twice to the White House.
Well, it's not quite accurate.
Because wouldn't that have said
it means how racist can white Americans be
because we white Americans elected
a black man twice to the White House.
But the majority of whites who have voted
have not voted for a Democratic candidate
for president since 1964.
- [Narrator] Barack Obama brought 15 million
new voters to the polls.
They were overwhelmingly African American,
Asian American, Hispanic, young, and poor.
A coalition that would be the hit list
for what would become voter suppression laws.
By 2012, over 180 bills restricting voting rights
appeared in 41 states.
Senator Lindsey Graham at the 2012 Republican
National Convention said out loud
what everyone was thinking.
The demographic race we're losing badly,
Republicans were not generating enough angry white guys
to stay in business for the long term.
The landmark Shelby versus Holder
Supreme Court decision in 2013 changed elections forever.
It ruled Section 4(b) unconstitutional.
Section 4(b) of 1965 Voting Rights Act
required free clearance for those states
that wanted to implement any changes
or that demonstrated a history of racial bias.
Chief Justice Roberts wrote that our country has changed,
and while any racial discrimination in voting is too much,
Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes
to remedy that problems speaks to current conditions
and that Congress' reasoning for Section 4(b)
was based on 40 year old facts,
having no logical relationship to the present day
and thus is not responsive to current needs.
In short, racism is over.
- So, in the 2006 reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act,
it came out in evidence that from 19,
starting in 1982 that the Department of Justice
had stopped over 700 attempts by the states
to implement racially discriminatory voting laws.
So all pre-clearance stopped over 700 attempts.
So when John Roberts is looking
saying ah that discrimination is a thing of the past,
we're talking in the 21st century
where there is evidence before the U.S. Supreme Court
about racial discrimination.
And the court chose to ignore it.
Two hours, with just two hours after the Shelby County
vee Holder decision is implemented,
boom Texas right off the bat implements its voter ID law.
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- [Narrator] Texas voter ID law SB 14
allowed for a limited number of IDs,
which white people are more likely to carry.
In particular, a gun license.
But it also included a drivers license,
which sounds innocuous enough until you realize
that nearly 1/3 of the counties in Texas do not have a DMV,
including some that are heavily minority.
For many, it would require a 250 mile
round trip visit to the DMV to obtain in ID.
Nearly 600,000 black, Latino, or poor voters
who were already registered did not have required ID,
in addition to one million
who were not registered also lacked it.
And because any language providing reimbursement
by the state was stripped out of the bill,
voter ID in Texas became a modern day poll tax.
The voter ID law in Texas was not an isolated incident.
According to the state of Indiana,
only 1% of the eligible population
did not have the required identification
which amounted to 43,000 citizens.
However, an independent study found the number
was not 1%, but 16%, and that whites
were 11.5 percentage points more likely
than African Americans to already have the acceptable ID.
But in places like Marion County,
where 200,000 of the state's black population lives,
there was a catch 22 at play.
To get the required ID,
you had to have a birth certificate.
And to get the birth certificate,
you needed the required ID.
In Georgia, HB 244 required an ID
from the Department of Driver Services,
but 1/3 of the state's counties did not have a bureau.
And in Atlanta, with a population
exceeding 480,000 residents,
of which nearly 60% are people of color,
there was not a single office.
North Carolina's voter registration
amongst African Americans increased 51% in the 21st century.
And their voter turnout rate in the 2008 and 2012 elections
were higher than that of whites,
so Republican legislators learned
which IDs favored white voters and required at those.
Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote that the law
clearly had a discriminatory intent.
In Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker promoted a bill
that would require an ID and then went about
closing motor vehicle offices in Democratic areas,
but extending the hours in those areas
that favored Republicans.
As author Jeremiah Goulka observed,
this was in a state in which half of blacks and Hispanics
are estimated to lack a driver's license
and 1/4 of its DMV offices
are open less than one day per month.
In Alabama, after their voter ID law was passed,
it wasn't Governor Robert Bentley
who came up with the idea to close the DMVs
in 31 predominantly black counties as a way to save money,
but Rebecca Mason's, his aide and mistress.
When challenged, Bentley finally agreed
to allow those offices to open for one day a month.
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(birds chirping)
- [Joanne] Green Street Baptist Church is a church that,
a historic church in African American community
and to just let that beautiful old church just go,
it's horrific.
But there's also the rest of the town that is in,
looks like Green Street too in a lot of places.
If we continue on this road,
the road we're goin' as of today,
I don't know how Selma's gonna survive.
What's goin' on with this yard?
All of this is poverty, all of this.
It's sad.
It was a thriving community
and when we had mass white flight,
white people left.
They left the houses, put up for sale signs some of 'em,
some of 'em rented the houses
and then didn't even bother to keep them up.
Y'know, they're not here anymore so it doesn't matter.
And then they tell the world that you ran it down
when you didn't, it was already runnin' down.
I can't, in all fairness, blame white flight on everything
that even when you're downtrodden,
you don't have to live like you're downtrodden.
You don't have to, you pick up the trash.
You don't put trash in your yard.
Now, it'll be a month or so
before the city just come and pick that up.
That's ridiculous.
Look at this house, it has so much character.
Dang.
- [Narrator] Alabama's poverty is striking
and ranked near the bottom of every index.
While 14% of whites live below the poverty line,
that number jumps to 34% for Latinos
and 31% for African Americans.
In nearly half of Alabama's black belt counties,
the conditions are those you would find
during the Great Depression.
A United Nations report on extreme poverty
found large portions of the black belt
had no waste disposal infrastructure.
For the poor, registering to vote is extremely difficult.
Alabama ranks 48th in the nation
for inner city transportation in a state
with a rural population of 844,000.
Nearly 14% of black households
compared to 4% of whites do not have access to a vehicle.
The state pretended to solve the problem
by allowing for online registration,
but 56% of the rural population
does not have access to the internet.
A mobile registration unit was created
but issued only 5,070 voter cards
out of the 250,000 they knew would be required.
In addition, they also closed nearly 7% of their precincts.
And despite African Americans making up 71% of those
who hold a government issued public housing ID,
it was excluded on the approved list.
According to Alabama's Secretary of State,
John Merril, the problem was very clear.
If you're too sorry or lazy to get up off your rear
and to go register to vote,
or to register electronically and then go vote,
then you don't deserve that privilege.
Of course, voting is not a privilege in America.
It is a right.
(soft music)
- And again, this is gonna sound really reasonable,
and that would be that periodically,
the Secretary of State would go through
and remove those who had died,
because you don't want dead folk voting,
who would remove those who had moved out of the district.
So say you had been in Georgia
and now you move to California,
you shouldn't be on the rolls in Georgia
if you're livin' in California now.
So again, it sounds reasonable.
And it says that you can't be removed
simply because you haven't voted.
Reasonable.
But that reasonableness in the hands of secretaries of state
has created massive damage.
- [Narrator] The damage is staggering.
Between the 2012 and 2016 election,
16 million voters were purged,
which represents a 33% increase
between the 2008 and 2012 elections.
In the run up to the 2018 election,
Georgia became the epicenter over voter purges
and their use it or lose it laws
because the person in charge of controlling who gets to vote
was one of the candidates running for governor.
The then Secretary of State Brian Kemp
purged nearly 1.2 million names from the rolls.
On the eve of the election,
his office lost the registrations of 40,000 Georgians
and placed 85,000 more under investigation
of which only 25 were found to have problems.
The majority of these new voters were people of color.
In the end, Kemp defeated his Democratic rival,
Stacey Abrams, by just 54,723 votes.
Purging of voter rolls went supernova
when Kris Kobach became Kansas' Secretary of State in 2011
and inherited a little known program
called Interstate Crosscheck.
Today, Crosscheck is used in over 30 states.
It cross-references the names,
birth dates, and the last four digits of 45 million
registered voters' social security numbers.
Over seven million names have been flagged by the system.
In 2016, Kobach's office rejected more ballots than Florida,
whose population is seven times larger than Kansas.
What makes Crosscheck so dangerous is how inaccurate it is.
Researchers have found that it has a 99% error rate
and a unique feature in the system
allows it to single out people of color
who predominantly don't vote Republican.
- How it works is most of the states,
many of the states don't bother with social security.
They don't bother with date of birth,
they don't bother with suffix,
and they really don't quite bother
with your middle name either.
They do some variation of your first name.
They really hone in on that last name.
But there's a problem with that.
Minorities are overrepresented
in terms of common last names.
In terms of common last names,
minorities are at 85 of the top 100
most common names in the United States.
For instance, if your last name is Washington,
there's almost a 90% chance that you're African American.
If your last name is Hernandez,
there's over a 90% chance that you're Hispanic.
If your last name is Lee,
over a 90% chance that you're Asian.
- There was a time that in my life
that I didn't even entertain the thought
of talkin' to white people, y'know.
They were just non-entities to me.
If I had to interact with any,
it was on a different level that I,
they were over there and I was over here.
And even when I was in the Army, right?
That I had all these white officers.
I worked, when I was in the Army,
I worked for JAG, I was a 71 Delta legal clerk then.
Most of the officers that I worked for were white.
And I generally liked some of them
but then if one said somethin' that I didn't,
that could be misconstrued as racist,
my antenna would go up.
Forrest's memory has been tainted
by the accusations started by a northern newspaper
during the war that he had ordered the execution
of black troops captured at Fort Pillow in Tennessee.
It was also rumored that he organized
the Ku Klux Klan resistance to reconstruction after the war.
Several Congressional inquiries
produced no credible evidence to support either accusation
and no charges were ever brought against Forrest.
Having accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and savior in 1875,
he was called home October 29, 1877.
Okay.
Okay, first of all, I don't think,
see this is what I call that history
that they tell their versions, y'know?
- [Narrator] After the Civil War,
the 13th Amendment abolished slavery
except as a form of punishment.
The master was replaced with a carceral state.
Under the Black Codes,
African Americans were arrested
on the simplest of offenses.
In 1868, Florida created a law to disenfranchise
those with a felony conviction.
By 1906, every state across the south
banned felons from voting.
- Felony disfranchisement has a long sordid history.
Let's talk about Alabama.
Alabama and its Jim Crow Constitution of 1901
crafted a language in there that said
if you have been convicted of a crime of moral turpitude,
you have lost your right to vote.
Alabama refused to define moral turpitude.
And so, you have a conviction
but you don't quite know if it's moral turpitude or not.
Are you going to risk voting and getting hit
with another felony because you decided to vote?
- [Narrator] In 2017,
Alabama finally defined moral turpitude.
But by that time, 15% of African American adults,
or one out of every seven, could not vote
because of felony disenfranchisement.
Over six million Americans can't vote
because of felony convictions.
1.7 million of them are in Florida,
where an amendment to Florida's constitution
was passed in 2018 to reverse this practice
only to have the Republican dominated legislature
act contrary to the will of the people
and kept it from happening.
- 40% of black adult men in Florida could not vote.
Over 20% of black adults in Florida could not vote.
Now Florida would count the heads of all of those people
when it came to the census,
which would then lead to the number of representatives
the state would have in Congress.
But none of those heads have the right to vote,
to be able to choose their representatives.
It was like the 3/5 clause all over again.
And let's be clear that what is driving
this massive felony disfranchisement is the war on drugs.
- I'm standin' on the last piece of the original cement
where the march from Selma to Montgomery left from.
Bloody Sunday, March 7th, 1965.
And I been tryin' to fight to save it
because I think it's important
that this history was bad, so I have to find a way
to connect the children to it
without just pointing out here and say that
that's where, y'know, that's where the march left from.
Big deal, they just see another empty space, right?
But I bring the children here and I stand them here
and I instruct them pick up a rock,
then I make them hold it up in the air
and say and then I identify at least three of 'em.
Oh, that's John Lewis' rock,
you do know how John Lewis is, right?
Sometimes they know, sometimes they don't.
Give me a teaching opportunity.
Oh, John Lewis was a congressman,
is a congressman now but I knew John Lewis 54 years ago
when he stood on that same rock you're holdin'.
He was the president of SNCC,
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Look at you holdin' that history in your hand.
You must be a history maker, too.
When you feel like you can't do anything,
go pick up that rock and hold it in your hand
and take from it the strength of the ordinary people
who stood on that same rock and made history
that not only changed this little town, but America.
And then get up off your behinds and do somethin' about it.
Is that clear?
And they all answer yes ma'am.
(soft music)
- Gerrymandering is as old as the nation itself.
But the way that it has basically come onto steroids
in the 21st century is absolutely frightening.
- [Narrator] Gerrymandering has always
been about party and race.
Every 10 years after the census, district maps are redrawn
based on the number of representatives.
In its simplest form,
redistricting would work as follows.
Let's say you have 100 voters
and you need to split them into 10 districts.
If you split them up evenly,
you would have 10 competitive districts
that could go either way.
However, what if you simply put
all of your competitor's voters into one district
and then split yours into the other nine?
Obviously, your opponent would win their one district
but you would win the other nine
and thus be able to make all the rules.
In an ideal world, districts are drawn fairly.
But we don't live in an ideal world.
President Benjamin Harrison called gerrymandering
political robbery, and he was right.
Both parties do it, that's nothing new.
But in 2010, when Republicans gained control
of the legislature in the governor's office in 26 states,
everything changed.
Aided by computer-driven software,
gerrymandering went to a whole new level.
Districts were now drawn down the block level,
and even to the houses on the block.
Districts were drawn to pack and stack segments
of the population in order to dilute their voting power
and suppress voter turnout.
Paul Weyrich with the American Legislative Exchange Council,
or ALEC, which helped craft voter suppression legislation,
was blunt in his reasoning.
I don't want everyone to vote.
The Republican party's leverage in the election
quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.
Texas is a minority majority state.
45% of the population is white,
but they control 70% of the districts.
And similar results are found in Michigan,
Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Florida,
all because of the some of the craziest gerrymandering ever.
The Louisiana Second District, Texas 35th,
Illinois Fourth, Florida Fifth, Maryland's Third,
and North Carolina's infamous 12th District.
In fact, of the 10 most egregious gerrymandered districts,
North Carolina leads the pack with three.
(birds chirping)
(somber music)
- I'm tired of people beating us down
and tryin' to act like we're not
the same just because my skin is dark
and some of my other brothers and sisters
may be white doesn't mean that God didn't make me too.
And I don't think God made it a joke, okay?
And the sooner we realize that we all human beings,
the better this world will be.
- The studies are really clear on this.
When you're white, generally what happens
is that whites in white neighborhoods
have to wait in line the least amount of time to vote.
And so it looks like ah, you go in,
you show an ID 'cause everybody has an ID,
you go cast your ballots,
you're in and out in what, five minutes, six minutes?
If you're a minority, however, again the studies are clear.
If you're black and you're in a black neighborhood,
you have the longest amount of time to wait to vote.
And that is because there are fewer machines
that actually work that have been assigned to your precinct.
There are fewer poll workers.
In short, there are fewer resources
put into minority precincts.
And so with fewer resources,
the line just grows and grows and grows.
And so here in Georgia, for instance, in our last election,
the average wait was about three hours to vote.
It looks like it's working,
it looks like everybody has the same opportunity.
They don't and that is deliberate.
- [Narrator] One of those tricks
is the restrictions placed on polling stations themselves.
African American and Latino voters
have traditionally been early voters.
Legislators in places like Ohio,
Indiana, North Carolina, and Florida
have reduced the availability of early voting.
13 states including Alabama
do not have any early voting at all.
In Ohio, the Secretary of State
allowed for only one early polling station per county.
That might work for the 6,000 people of Pickaway County,
which is nearly 95% white.
But in Hamilton County,
home to the state's third largest city,
the majority minority city of Cincinnati,
one polling station for 800,000 people
just isn't gonna cut it.
In Indiana's 92 counties,
only three have populations larger than 325,000 residents.
62% of all African Americans in Indiana
live in two of the three counties, Marion and Lake.
It probably comes as no surprise, then,
that former governor Mike Pence
and the Republican-led legislature decided
that counties with a population over 325,000
were restricted to one polling station
unless the bipartisan county election board
unanimously voted to have more.
Smaller white counties have no such restrictions.
But closing early polling stations
is just one way to restrict access to the vote.
Moving the location is effective, as well.
North Carolina moved nearly 1/3 of those
in predominantly black areas.
Studies have shown that voting by black voters
drops .5% for every tenth of a mile
the polling station is moved.
It's estimated that 19,000 black voters
were kept from voting using this method.
- [Joanne] I need people to understand this.
This history happened.
And we can't go back and erase it.
But what came out of that history
and where do we take it from there?
Sometimes I think I'm marchin' over that bridge again
or definitely gonna have to march over there again
to make a change.
But we need each other, we're not goin' anywhere.
We're not movin' forward when you try to hurt us,
a whole segment of people.
You're not movin' forward, you just think you are.
And it's gonna always be that unrest
and that craziness you have to deal with
when the power is not distributed properly.
And that's what most movements are about,
distribution of power.
- One of the things that we began to understand
in the movement, during the Civil Rights movement,
was that as long as somebody was not free,
none of us were free.
That hasn't changed.
When we're talking about what is happening
with voter suppression where we get representatives
who are unrepresentative.
We get members in a democracy
who are not responsible to that democracy.
None of us are free.
- [Narrator] Of the one billion votes
cast between 2000 and 2014,
there were 31 reported incidents of voter fraud.
These included false claims by the loser.
The incident rate of voter fraud
is between .0003% and .0025%.
In 2016, there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
In short, voter fraud is a false flag narrative
designed to suppress and disenfranchise
specific bodies of the electorate
in order to maintain the status quo in a changing America.
Donald Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton
by nearly three million votes in 2016.
Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin made him president.
If Hillary won those three states,
which Obama won in 2008 and 2012, she would be president.
But she didn't.
Voter suppression worked.
The most striking results are in Wisconsin
where the voting rates of African Americans
dropped to less than 50% in 2016 from 78% in 2012.
This decline was more than four times the national average.
Wisconsin is 92% white.
There's 348,308 African American citizens
make up just 6.1% of the population.
Nearly 70% of Wisconsin's black population
lives in Milwaukee.
65% are of voting age.
In the 2016 election, 50,000 fewer votes were cast
in Milwaukee as a result of voter suppression.
Donald J. Trump won Wisconsin by 22,748 votes.
- Obama said yes we can.
And we saw what happened in that 2008 election.
Today, we have to say yes we will.
It is upon us to stand up and fight for this democracy.
Yes we will.
It is that determination that had 11 year old Joanne Bland
on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
This was a little girl well before she could be able to vote
willing to put it on the line to be free.
That's a freedom fighter.
Yes we will.
That's how we get the democracy we deserve,
not the one that they're trying to foist upon us.
♪ Oh yeah ♪
♪ Hold on ♪
♪ Hold on to the family ♪
♪ Lay low ♪
♪ Lay low in the valley ♪
♪ We roll ♪
♪ We like when the family stay strong ♪
♪ Stay strong y'all ♪
♪ Stay strong at the rally ♪
♪ Hold on ♪
♪ Listen up ♪
♪ Selma's disintegratin' ♪
♪ Half a century waitin' ♪
♪ And we still patient ♪
♪ The old plantation ♪
♪ Still runs the nation ♪
♪ Voter registration turn to frustration ♪
♪ Massive carceration ♪
♪ Go ahead put them in ♪
♪ But we gon' be here for a while ♪
♪ Checkin' out gerrymanderin' ♪
♪ Used to be poll tax and literacy tests ♪
♪ Now it's redistrictin' ♪
♪ I mean look at this mess ♪
♪ Hold on ♪
♪ Hold on to the family ♪
♪ Law low ♪
♪ Lay low in the valley ♪
♪ We roll ♪
♪ You like when the families stay strong ♪
♪ Yeah stay strong y'all ♪
♪ Stay strong at the rally ♪
♪ Hold on ♪
♪ It's a town of white flight and retributions ♪
♪ The dark folks been strugglin' for decades refutin' ♪
♪ Used to be Jim Clark ♪
♪ Now it's the new Jim Crow ♪
♪ We used to see him spark ♪
♪ Now the lights dim low ♪
♪ Looks different but the same ol' endin' ♪
♪ Keep folks out of the polls ♪
♪ Same folks winnin' ♪
♪ Matter of fact, it's sickenin' ♪
♪ That these folks can still get away ♪
♪ With this nonsense, yeah I'm talkin' 'bout today ♪
♪ Hold on ♪
♪ Hold on to the family ♪
♪ Lay low ♪
♪ Lay low in the valley ♪
♪ We roll ♪
♪ You like when the families stay strong ♪
♪ Stay strong at the rally ♪
♪ Hold on ♪
♪ They wanna maintain the status quo ♪
♪ As America becomes brown again they sayin' no ♪
♪ They even mad at area of the mermaid chieftan ♪
♪ Imagine what they gon' do when the vote is as deep ♪
♪ We movin' towards apartheid ♪
♪ We even some sticks ♪
♪ Arranged as a failed democracy filled with hate ♪
♪ The same race-dated tactics apply your eyes ♪
♪ While the sin of slavery we still tryin' to hide ♪
♪ Won't need to hide ♪
♪ Votin' ain't even a privilege, it's a right ♪
♪ Folks were shot, killed, jailed, and beat in this plight ♪
♪ Are we sick and tired of bein' sick and tired ♪
♪ It's time now ♪
♪ For us to take a stand and fight this crime now ♪
♪ You got to stand for somethin' or you'll fall for anything ♪
♪ We are the people and justice is the very thing ♪
♪ We want ♪
♪ Yes we can gotta be yes we will ♪
♪ So let's make a play before the rest is killed ♪
♪ This isn't a game that we're playin' ♪
♪ Don't let 'em play you ♪
♪ Step out the arena ♪
♪ Tell your family stay true ♪
♪ Yes ♪
♪ And we need each other to survive and grow ♪
♪ After Selma there is hope ♪
♪ We gonna reap what we sow ♪
♪ I know ♪
♪ My Jesus will save me ♪
♪ Follow ♪
♪ My Lord til I can't breathe ♪
♪ I go ♪
♪ Wherever he takes me ♪
♪ He won't ♪
♪ Won't ever forsake me ♪
♪ Hold on ♪