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The enactment of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 extended the right to vote to Black men. Black women wouldn't be allowed to vote until the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920, and Black Americans continued to face discrimination in the form of poll taxes, literacy tests, white-only primaries in some Southern states, and outright voter intimidation and violence at the polls for decades. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was then signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson to overcome legal barriers at the state and local levels that prevented African Americans from exercising their right to vote as guaranteed under the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.Black Americans and voters of color face barriers to voting at every step of the process even today due to state restrictions like barring people with felony convictions from voting, and strict voter ID laws.1 in 13 Black Americans--compared to 1 in 56 non-Black Americans--nationwide having lost their right to vote due to a felony conviction according to the most recent comprehensive state-level research from 2016.Multiple studies have found that Black Americans and voters of color are less likely than whites to hold the requires ID to vote due to lack of access and are more burdened by voter ID laws.

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The Supreme Court on June 25, 2013 effectively struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by a 5-to-4 vote, freeing nine states, mostly in the South, to change their election laws without advance federal approval.

The law had applied to nine states — Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia — and to scores of counties and municipalities in other states, including Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx.

Immediately after the decision, Republican lawmakers in Texas and North Carolina – two states previously covered by the law – moved to enact new voter ID laws and other restrictions.





Jonathan Daniels Center for Social Responsiblity: Voting Rights 

Jonathan Daniels Trail

Jonathan Daniels trail honors the work of Jonathan Myrick Daniels (1939-1965), a civil rights activist, and an Episcopal Seminarian. He died in 1965 while shielding a 17-years old Black civil rights activist Ruby Sales. Keene-born Jonathan decided to leave New England in the half-century when he responded to Martin Luther King Jr.'s call for active participation of clergymen in Selma, Alabama. He become involved in the civil rights movement and assisted with voter's registration efforts in the South. Jonathan refused to allow the privilege of his race, education, status, and articulate nature to make him a person of more value than those with which he interacted. The trail carries both historical and environmental value. It aims to educate the visitors about Jonathan's life.

This walking trail is a beautiful stone dust trail located alongside Ashuelot River in Keene, New Hampshire. The trail starts at the intersection of the Chesire Rail Trail and Island street in downtown Keene. The north end of the trail intersects the Apple Way trail. The trail is an opportunity for the visitors to explore both the nature and the history of Keene. The trail is named after Jonathan Daniels, a civil rights activist from Keene. Stops along the trail will help educate visitors about Jonathan Daniel's important life events. The City of Keene Parks & Recreation maintains the trail.


White privilege is not the suggestion that white people have never struggled. Many white people do not enjoy the privileges that come with relative affluence, such as food security. Many do not experience the privileges that come with access, such as nearby hospitals White privilege is not the assumption that everything a white person has accomplished is unearned; most white people who have reached a high level of success worked extremely hard to get there. Instead, white privilege should be viewed as a built-in advantage, separate from one’s level of income or effort. White privilege is having greater access to power and resources than people of color [in the same situation] do.

Beyond recognizing white privilege, white people can use it in a way that is beneficial to all people. Here’s how:

1. Don't take it personally, and ask, "What actions can I take to help?"
2. Educate yourself! Here are some of the resources to help you educate about white privilege and existing systemic racism in America.

Books:

"So You Want to Talk About Race" by Ijeoma Oluo

"The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In The Age of Colorblindness" by Michelle Alexander
"White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism" by Robin DiAngelo
"Racism without Racists: Colorblind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States" by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
"Two Faced Racism: Whites in the Backstage and Frontstage" by Leslie Picca and Joe Feagin
"Race and Racisms: A Critical Approach" by Tanya Golash Boza
"Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations" by Joe Feagin
"White Rage; the Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide" by Carol Anderson

Videos and Film:

Clint Smith’s How to Raise A Black Son in America TedTalk
Roots of Justice Front Porch Conversation
13th (Netflix Documentary)
Dear White People (Netflix)
The Hate You Give (Netflix)
What Matters: #BLM Documentary series
I am Not Your Negro

Organizations to get involved in:

Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire
Racial Justice Panel in Keene

For more information contact: jonathandanielscenter.org



Jonathan Daniels Center for Social Responsiblity: What can you do?

The organized groups of white men known as <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/pages/interactives/1619-african-slavery-history-maps-routes-interactive-graphic/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color:rgb(255, 255, 255);color:rgb(48, 48, 48)">slave patrols</a> lay at the roots of the nation's law enforcement excesses, historians say, helping launch centuries of violent and racist behavior toward Black Americans, as well as a<a href="https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/graphics/2020/06/03/map-protests-wake-george-floyds-death/5310149002/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color:rgb(255, 255, 255);color:rgb(48, 48, 48)"> tradition of protests</a> and uprisings against police brutality. As the slave population increased in the U.S., slave patrols were formed in South Carolina and expanded to other Southern states. Slave patrols were not designed to protect public safety in the broadest sense but rather to protect white wealth. After the abolition of slavery in 1865 with the passing of the 13th Amendment toward the end of the Civil War, slave patrols were done away with and modern police departments become more common. African Americans, however, were still heavily policed by law enforcement officials. The Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups terrorized Black communities. Some law enforcement and other government officials became KKK members, especially in the South. During the civil rights era, images of police brutally suppressing peaceful activists, including with the use of dogs and fire hoses, in part helped usher in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion and sex. But as Black Americans gained more rights, lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle looked for ways to criminalize the Black community. From 1980 and 2015, the nation's prison population climbed from roughly 500,000 to more than 2.2 million, with Black Americans making up 34% of all inmates,<a href="https://www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color:rgb(255, 255, 255);color:rgb(48, 48, 48)"> according to the NAACP. </a>Only 13% of Americans identify as Black, according to the U.S. Census.

Police departments have 400-year history of racism. According to the research group Mapping Police Violence, African Americans are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a white person.

Jonathan Daniels Center for Social Responsiblity: Police Brutality

The sex discrimination claim is treated as a side issue in histories told from a racial equality perspective, while the race discrimination claim is treated as a side issue in the feminist legal histories. The race and sex discrimination claims ended up side-by-side for the first time in a case that arose out of the murder of Jonathan Daniels in the Deep South. Tom Coleman, a middle-aged white man and volunteer deputy sheriff shot and killed white civil rights activist Jonathan Daniels in 1965. A born-and-bred white southern civil rights lawyer Charles Morgan knew that an all-white, all-male jury would be almost certain to acquit Coleman. Morgan saw an opportunity to use the near certainty of an unfair prosecution and stacked jury in the Coleman case to challenge in federal court Alabama’s deeply embedded patterns of jury discrimination through a civil suit. Morgan traveled to Alabama and filed suit in federal court on behalf of five African-American would-be jurors — Gardenia White, Lillian S. McGill, Jesse W. Favor, Willie May Strickland, and John Hulett, as well as Reverend Morris, and Jonathan Daniels’ mother. He filed the case against Bruce Crook, Alabama’s white jury commissioner, his fellow white jury commissioners, and other Lowndes County officials. Morgan threw the lawsuit together in five days, selecting Gardenia White (a woman of color) as lead plaintiff. The brief argued that sex was an irrational and arbitrary legislative classification for the purposes of jury service, and that, as such, it violated the Equal Protection Clause. Partially in response to this phenomenon, Professor Kimberle Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in the 1980s to demonstrate the tendency “to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis” in both law and society

It was not until White v. Crook, a 1965 case in which the American
Civil Liberties Union (“ACLU”) challenged the exclusion of African-Americans
and women from Alabama juries, that a federal court recognized that the statutory exclusion of women from jury service constituted discrimination under the
Fourteenth Amendment.

Jonathan Daniels Center for Social Responsiblity: White v. Crook

Through the first half of the 20th century, the federal government actively excluded Black people from government wealth-building programs.In the 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal helped build a solid middle class through sweeping social programs, including Social Security and the minimum wage. But a majority of Black people at the time were agricultural laborers or domestic workers, occupations that were ineligible for these benefits. The establishment of the Home Owners Loan Corporation in 1933 helped save the collapsing housing market, but it largely excluded Black neighborhoods from government-insured loans. Those neighborhoods were deemed “hazardous” and colored in with red on maps, a practice that came to be known as “redlining.” The G.I. Bill is often hailed as one of Roosevelt’s most enduring legacies. It helped usher millions of working-class veterans through college and into new homes and the middle class. But it discriminatorily benefited white people. While the bill didn’t explicitly exclude Black veterans, the way it was administered often did. The bill gave veterans access to mortgages with no down payments, but the Veterans Administration adopted the same racially restrictive policies as the Federal Housing Administration, which guaranteed bank loans only to developers who wouldn’t sell to Black people.

White Americans have seven times the wealth of Black Americans on average according to a New York Times magazine's article published in August 14, 2019. "Though Black people make up nearly 13 percent of the United States population, they hold less than 3 percent of the nation’s total wealth. "

According to the Economic Policy Institute, 19 percent of Black households have zero or negative net worth. Just 9 percent of white families are that poor.

The vast wealth gap wasn't just due too slavery but driven by segregation, redlining, evictions and exclusion, separates Black and white America.

Jonathan Daniels Center for Social Responsiblity: Racial Wealth Gap

Meanwhile, while a growing number of African-American and Hispanic members of the armed forces fought and died in the Vietnam War, on the home front their families had trouble renting or purchasing homes in certain residential areas because of their race or national origin. In this climate, different organizations lobbied for new fair housing legislation to be passed. In early April 1968 the bill passed the U.S. Senate and then went too the House of Representatives. Congress had already rejected two earlier versions of the law, and the 1968 Act seemed destined for a similar fate. However, on the day of Senate vote on April 4, the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Amid a wave of emotion—including riots, burning and looting in more than 100 cities around the country—President Lyndon b. Johnson increased pressure on Congress to pass the new civil rights legislation. After a strictly limited debate, the House passed the Fair Housing Act on April 10, and President Johnson signed it into law the following day.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental and financing of housing based on race, religion, national origin or sex. The Fair Housing Act stands as the final great legislative achievement of the civil rights era.

From 1950 to 1980, the total Black population in America’s urban centers increased from 6.1 million to 15.3 million. When the white Americans could not keep the Blacks out of the white neighborhoods, they steadily moved out of the cities into the suburbs, taking many of the employment opportunities Blacks needed into communities where they were not welcome to live.

This trend led to the growth in urban America of ghettos, or inner city communities with high minority populations that were plagued by unemployment, crime and other social ills.

Jonathan Daniels Trail

Jonathan Daniels Center for Social Responsiblity: Voting Rights

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Backstory and Context

Sources

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