In March 1965, Carolyn Coleman, a young activist with the Alabama NAACP, marched to Montgomery in support of the Voting Rights Act. After the passage of the VRA, Coleman spent a year registering voters in Mississippi, where her friend Wharlest Jackson, an NAACP leader in Natchez, was killed in early February 1967 by a car bomb after receiving a promotion at the local tire plant. A year later, Coleman was in Memphis organizing striking sanitation workers when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Coleman devoted her life to expanding the franchise for the previously disenfranchised, serving as president of the North Carolina NAACP and Southern voter education director for the national NAACP. For the past twelve years, she’s been a county commissioner in Greensboro’s Guilford County. Nearly fifty years after marching for voting rights in Alabama, Coleman testified in federal court today in Winston-Salem against North Carolina’s new voting restrictions, which have been described as the most onerous in the nation. The law mandates strict voter ID, cuts early voting by a week and eliminates same-day registration, among many other things. After the bill’s passage, “I was devastated,” Coleman testified. “I felt like I was living life over again. Everything that I worked for for the last fifty years was being lost.”
The federal government and civil rights groups, including the ACLU and the North Carolina NAACP, asked Judge Thomas Schroeder, a George W. Bush appointee for the Middle District of North Carolina, to enjoin key provisions of the law before the 2014 midterms under Section 2 of the VRA. They’re specifically targeting the cuts to early voting, the elimination of same-day registration during the early voting period and the prohibition on counting provisional ballots accidentally cast in the wrong precinct. (The new voter ID law, unlike the above provisions, doesn’t go into effect until 2016, although the state is doing a “test run” in 2014 where poll workers can ask for photo ID although voters don’t have to provide it.) The hearing is expected to last until later in the week, with a decision in the next month or so.
“These provisions have the purpose and result of denying and abridging the right to vote for African-Americans,” argued DOJ attorney Catherine Meza. The plaintiffs say the new restrictions disadvantage minority voters at a greater rate than white voters, in violation of Section 2’s ban on racial discrimination in voting.
Full Article: North Carolina’s ‘Monster’ Voting Law Challenged in Federal Court | The Nation.