(ThyBlackMan.com) Voter suppression of the black community is nothing new especially here in The Deep South because during the peak of the black struggles in the 1960s, black people engaged with a fierce struggle to gain so-called “equal rights” under colonial U.S. law and one of them in particular was our right to vote.
This struggle to achieve the voting rights wasn’t easy as working class blacks were not only dealing with threats of racial violence and death, but by the time we did get “the right to vote”, The Imperialist U.S. Government through its vicious COINTELPRO aka counterinsurgency program assassinated our powerful black leaders like MLK and Malcolm X and crushed The Black Power movements which left us with absolutely nothing to vote for other than these parasitic paternalistic Democratic Party thrown in our faces as “the lesser of two evils” in reality is just as evil as The Imperialist Republican Party. 
The U.S. Government has continued its tactics of voter suppression of black communities throughout the country in new days with one of those being certain voting restrictions being placed on convicted felons. Let’s not forget that the vast majority of people affected by this new systemic voter suppression tactic ongoing are mostly working class black people.
Not because they claim that there’s “something wrong with us black people” because we can’t stop committing “crime”, but the hypocrisy comes into play while they say that we’re “this and that”, we’ve actually been and is currently still to this day being locked up for the same crimes that white people commit all the time, but we’re far more likely to get longer sentences than white people for the exact same crime.
Even here in Alabama, state politicians have gone out of their way to make sure that we don’t fully exercise our political power at the polls to vote, especially the working class black people who are often forgotten during the election season.
One form of voter suppression of the black community in The Deep South especially here in Alabama actually took place several years ago when state politicians passed a law that requires photo ID at the voting polls in order to vote and the vast majority of people that have been negatively affected by this new law are mostly working class black people who lack a photo ID to vote at the polls and this is nothing more but a systemic plan by The State Government to make sure that our vote doesn’t count.
Another voter suppression tactic that state politicians have done a few years ago was to pass another law that restores the voting rights of only those (mostly black people) who have committed nonviolent felonies, but here’s the catch: they have to pay all court fees and fines. And we as black people are forced to pay the highest price of these ridiculous court fees and fines to even have our voting rights restored which is a clear systemic assault on our democratic right to vote.
A few years ago here in Alabama, former governor Robert Bentley tried to deliberately close down DMV offices in predominantly urban counties in the state and this later led to huge backlash from civil rights groups saying that it was a way to suppress black voters from voting in the state of Alabama and I agreed with their assessment of that because under this oppressive and vicious colonial social system, our political power is very limited because our voting rights were stripped away from us and we are continuously being punished by the colonial social system to this day for things that we did in the past.
Another voter suppression tactic the southern states in particular use nowadays is when they gerrymander a certain district, particularly a predominantly black district where the non-gentrified parts of that particular district are taken out and the gentrified white parts of the district are put into the district that greatly limits the representation of real black leaders that black people can vote for..
The Conclusion – I support the full restoration of voting rights for the black community because not only will this allow us to fully exercise our voting power, but will also bring about an end to the ongoing democratic assault on the black community through voter suppression.
Staff Writer; Kwame Shakir (aka Joe D.)