About coercing African Americans to vote by white politicians - a bit of history
Article about how blacks traded their safety and their lives TO vote-- especially in Tennessee where a white politician paid blacks poll taxes so they would vote and vote Democratic. But, make no mistake, it was to preserve white supremacy.
During a recent campaign rally in Tennessee, Donald Trump claimed that most African Americans have been voting for the Democratic Party for over a century. He told supporters, “African Americans vote for Democrats, for the most part. Vast majority. They’ve been doing it for over a hundred years.”
A number of commentators have pointed out that Trump’s comment is historically inaccurate because most African-Americans in the south could not vote until the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. Additionally, many African Americans who could vote before the 1960s — located mostly in the north — were supporters of the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln and emancipation. This was especially true before Franklin Roosevelt introduced the New Deal during the Great Depression, but well into the 1960s moderate-to-liberal Republican candidates still won sizeable shares of the black vote.
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Until the mid-20th century, many essential features of a democracy — free and fair elections, multiparty competition, universal franchise, free assembly and speech — were withheld from millions of US citizens. For that reason, it is impossible to describe the U.S. as having been a full democracy for any more than five decades. This fact should be basic to every American’s understanding of their country’s development — but many (white) Americans prefer to imagine their country as one of the world’s oldest democracies. In fact, it only joined the club relatively recently.’’
https://timeline.com/white-politicians-coercing-black-voters-6f1b835fe102