Blacks have to be wary of Justice Thomas and his ultra conservative bedfellows

Raashida Fleetwood travelled to South Carolina last year to help register voters to help elect the first Black president of the United States, Barack Obama."Our drive was very successful, but it opened my eyes to discrimination still taking place even today," said Fleetwood, a senior majoring in political science at Howard University. "Residents were being given false information mainly- wrong polling addresses and dates to vote."

One elderly couple told Fleetwood that they tried to register three different times and were told they could not vote but were not given a reason why not, Fleetwood recalled.

Fleetwood is rejoicing that Obama's success means Blacks have made significant progress on the cause of liberty in America. But she is sad that another Black man, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is hell bent on re-imposing voting barriers and dismantling whatever hiring gains Blacks have made under the Civil Rights Act.

Last month, Justice Thomas cast the lone vote against extending the 25-year-old Voting Rights Act's controversial Section 5. Calling the provision "unconstitutional", Thomas argued that race is no longer an issue in America. A week later, he voted in favor of New Haven, Connecticut, White firemen against that city's affirmative action initiative to promote more Black firemen.

"In 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified in order to guarantee that no citizen would be denied the right to vote based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude," said Thomas. "Congress passed Section 5 of the VRA in 1965 because that promise had remained unfulfilled for far too long. But now, more than 40 years later, the violence, intimidation, and subterfuge that led Congress to pass Section 5 and this Court to uphold it no longer remains."

NAACP president Benjamin Jealous disagrees vehemently.

"While some may think that voter discrimination is a thing of the past, it is clear that it is not," Jealous told the District Chronicles. " Jim Crow might be dead but James Crow Esquire is alive and well, and while we may not see fire hoses and police dogs any longer, they have been replaced by false emails and polling station trickery."

Jealous applauded the Court's decision to uphold it with an overwhelming vote of 8 - 1.

Howard University Law School Professor Anderson B. Francois and his students have been working on this case in his Civil Rights Clinic where students take on real constitutional cases. They wrote an Amicus brief on behalf of Congressman John Lewis of Georgia who was an original freedom rider in the 1960s and was almost beaten to death protesting the lack of voting rights in the south.

"That in itself made so much national news that there was a great of pressure on Congress and President Lyndon Johnson to pass the Voting Rights Act," said Francois. "So the brief we wrote on behalf of Congressman Lewis argued to the court that the work that he had begun, the work he almost gave his life for, was still necessary to go on and that the statute was still needed."

American University student Dominique Kleeman can't believe what Justice Thomas is about.

"I do not understand him," she laments. "On one hand, he is against racial preference, but these are the very programs that benefitted him, brought him to where he is."

Paralegal and Urban League member Dante Ford is one of the many people having trouble understanding Justice Thomas.

"I am from a small town in Arkansas and Justice Thomas cannot tell me voting discrimination does not exist," said Ford. "He continually aligns himself with the ultra conservative right; I don't understand how a man who came from Pin Point, Georgia, to the Supreme Court doesn't believe in the necessity of race-conscious initiatives."

Like to many others, Thomas is an enigma to Robert M. O'Neil, former president of the University of Virginia and now a constitutional law professor. O'Neil invited Thomas as a guest speaker in his constitutional law class and says he acknowledged the progress America has made since the enactment of the Voting Rights Act.

But Thomas told the class he is convinced the circumstances that gave rise to the voting rights procedure "have ceased to exist and thus it is now unconstitutional to extend or renew as Congress did."

Grace Salvant, public relations chair for the Howard University chapter of NAACP, does not feel that voting rights protection has become irrelevant.

"It's been embedded in our history and it's not going away with the arrival of Obama as President," she said. "In fact, I think these topics: civil rights, voting protection, etc. need protection now more than ever.