Adam Serwer

He would be like, yeah, that sounds right.

He would probably be surprised it was Republicans, but that's about it.

The framers of the 15th Amendment,

They wrote that amendment in the context of racist, partisan, attempted disenfranchisement of Black people.

That's why it was written.

The idea that you couldn't disentangle those things.

or that it would be impossible to do that, or that it wouldn't count if it was motivated by partisanship, would have struck them as insane.

So to see the originalists on the court pretend like this is just too complicated a problem and expect us to believe that is absurd and ridiculous.

They know what they're doing.

They knew that this would be the consequences.

And the only thing I can say, to go back to our previous question,

about the voters is that if the voters don't understand the gravity of what they've done and correct their mistake and overcorrect their mistake, really, I do think

we are in for a period of time that is going to be very bad.

And I think when you look at the writings of Black activists and journalists and intellectuals in the period right after Reconstruction, we have to remember that full disenfranchisement of Black Americans does not happen immediately after Reconstruction.

There's a brief period, in fact, where they are working with the white populace

to create biracial coalitions in the South and in some places, North Carolina, Virginia, these are actually quite successful.

It is after that, that the sort of overt white supremacy campaigns that

Usher and Jim Crow occur.

And this is the subject of C. Van Woodward's strange career of Jim Crow, which was considered the Bible of the civil rights movement, precisely because it presented this history as contingent.

And what black intellectuals write during that period is that the violence and lynching that occurs, occurs post disenfranchisement.