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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 7/14/14

The Lost Legacy of Freedom Summer

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Message John Hawkins

The 'Freedom Summer' led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and, of course, it is right to emphasize that this was an accomplishment shared by like-minded whites and blacks. Clearly, the equal right to vote should be the crown jewel of any modern, pluralistic democracy, and the struggle to get there should be recalled with more universal pride than it is. Again as Haines sums up,

It is not the responsibility of black Americans to make white Americans

feel comfortable with this history. Rather, it is time for white Americans to

simultaneously own their role in the ugly parts of segregation and be proud

of those who were on the right side of history.

And that's where the rub comes in.

Had such pride in universal inclusivity been in play in 2000, it is unthinkable that the Florida presidential election debacle would have taken place--or, if it did, that it would have been allowed to stand. While many white Democrats and self-styled progressives point to that colossal systemic failure in democracy and blame Ralph Nader for siphoning votes away from Al Gore, or the failure of the latter to win his own home state's electoral votes, it is the rather quiet, almost-forgotten-already decision by the US Supreme Court to not allow a recount of votes in key Florida districts--with strictly partisan reasoning and the application of obtuse partisan technicalities (it would have gone beyond a mandated deadline). As lightning-rod attorney Alan Dershowitz remarked after the Justices handed down their decision:

[T]he decision in the Florida election case may be ranked as the single

most corrupt decision in Supreme Court history, because it is the only

one that I know of where the majority justices decided as they did

because of the personal identity and political affiliation of the litigants.

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John Hawkins is a freelance writer from Boston. While he focuses mostly on fiction and poetry at the moment, he also writes political essays and book reviews. His work has appeared in publications in Australia, the US and the Czech Republic.

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