The soul of a nation: Black men vote too
Dr. Keith Magee
The battle to ‘Restore America’s Soul’ is Joe Biden’s presidential campaign slogan. After an over congested democratic primary, Biden is now the 2020 presumptive nominee. It appears that for Biden soul is neither homage to his Roman Catholic upbringing nor a nod to having enjoyed a Chicago Southside Sunday dinner prepared by Marian Robinson (Michelle Obama’s mother). Instead Biden asserts that his presidency will create policies that reflect our shared values. It is also a commitment to return integrity to the office of the President of the United States. While some, and a majority of people color, feel President Donald Trump has sullied the office, there are others, most of whom are White, who feel former President Barack Obama created an environment in which they needed to try to take the country back.
Over a decade ago, the leadership of the GOP erupted in fear over Obama ascending to the presidency. There seemed to be concern that a Soul Fest would break out at the White House. The South Lawn would host picnics with fried chicken and watermelon. The helicopter landing would transform to a dance floor with the electric side and a Soul Train line. The Queen of Soul would have an impromptu concert from the Truman Balcony belting out R-E-S-P-E-C-T! Oh, and maybe even, over in the Rose Garden there’d be a scramble board revealing the week’s notable African American history—and, of course, over in the Jackie Kennedy Garden several card-tables for spades and dominos.
For eight years the country, love it or hate it, got to experience the soul of Barack Obama and his family. June 2020 will make five years since Trump announced his candidacy for president and under that context the country and the world have gotten to know his soul.
The meaning of soul differs depending on a number of dynamics. Some psychologists have identified it as the immaterial essence and totality of who you are at a core level–your true nature. Mateo Sol suggests that the soul either gravitates toward light or darkness depending on how one’s ego is developed. An ego is usually constructed from a collection of memories and beliefs about who you are, where you came from, and identity of what good and bad, all connecting to the meaning of core value—soul.
President Trump’s ego led to his mantra of ‘Make America Great Again’ is, arguably, a call of America’s restoration. Trump emerged to champion the hatred and racism that ensued after Mitch McConnell’s failed attempt to make Obama a one term president. The blatant disrespect of Congressman Joe Wilson’s shouting “You lie!” during Obama’s 2009 joint session of Congress was too seeded with core values brewing within some in the Republican party.
This group had a disdain for a Black man who’d had sworn to up hold America’s most sacred document, the U.S. Constitution. When it was written in 1787, the Founding Fathers didn’t deem the Negro slave as a person or citizen. It wouldn’t be until 1867, following America’s Civil War, that slavery would be abolished in America. A Republican-dominated Congress passed the First Reconstruction Act, giving way to the 15th Amendment which divided the South into military districts and outlined a new government, based on manhood suffrage including Black men.
Within this era, Frederick Douglass partnered with his friend, Women’s suffrage advocate Susan B. Anthony, towards mutual equality. Upon his taking on a gradualist position, which wouldn’t include women as a protected class in the 15th Amendment, Anthony said, “I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the [White] woman.” However, White men running the Republican party understood the power dynamic of Black men helping them to regain the South.
The day after the 15th Amendment was ratified in 1870, Thomas Mundy Peterson of Perth Amboy, N.J., became the first Black man to vote. By the late 1870s, more than 20 Black men served in Congress, with more than 600 serving in state legislatures and local offices. The same Republican party, however, effectively nullified both the 14th Amendment which guaranteed citizenship with all privileges to Black men, and the 15th amendment—stripping their rights to vote.
The ensuing decades bore witness to various discriminatory and voter suppression practices: poll taxes and literacy tests, along with Jim Crow laws, intimidation and outright violence—were used to prevent Blacks from exercising their right to vote. It was not until 1965 Voting Rights Act, led by Black men—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rev. Ralph Abernathy, and Andrew Young, who went on to serve in Congress, as UN Ambassador and mayor of Atlanta, and others – including women, that Blacks would legally gain the right to vote.
An estimated 30 million Black Americans are eligible to vote in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center. While Black women are rightfully celebrated as anchors of the Democratic Party, Black men have a long history of voting Democratic as well. According to the 2019 Center for American Progress States of Change report, 78 percent of Black men with a college degree voted for Clinton (16 percent voted for Trump) and 82 percent without a college degree voted Democrat (11 percent voted for Trump).
In August 2015, I was in Cleveland, Ohio, attending the memorial services of a mentor and fraternity brother, Congressman Louis Stokes. After the services, I took an uber to a dinner with members of the Congressional Black Caucus. The driver was a married 54-year-old Black male, father of three, and native of Cleveland. And, he was a Trump supporter.
He had lost his construction job during Obama’s administration. He felt that with Trump as president, having built hotels all over the world, trusted that Trump would put Black men back to work. And, of course, Trump had reputation as the celebrity boss from The Apprentice, having given every day people chances. After sitting in his car for 90 minutes, with a $100 bill (that would have been $12), and missing the dinner, getting out of the car, shaking my head in disbelief, I said to myself, “if these are barbershop conversations, Donald Trump is going to win.”
During the 2018 midterm election, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 49 percent of Americans voted. There was only a 2 percentage differential in comparison with non-Hispanic Black, voting at 47 percent. Black men are focused on survival—and making it happen for themselves. For some, the immediate results of neither Obama nor Trump has delivered a crumb, let alone a slice of the American pie.
Whereas criminal justice reform, free and subsidized child care, keeping the family safe and, sure, marijuana legalization are important to Black men, the basics of sustainability and wealth creation is missing. More than anything Black men want equality and an opportunity to fully live the American dream, to provide and amass wealth. They don’t want to build skyline condominiums they can’t own. Nor do they want to pave roads upon which they can’t drive the same cars. Most importantly, Black men know that they directly descended from the ‘commodity’ that has built America’s wealth, from free slave labor of the sugar industry to currently being the products of privatized prisons. Black men are no longer interested in being counted as inmates or voters but rather included as citizens upon which the government and society are accountable to their needs.
In W.E.B. Dubois’ seminal collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folks, written in 1903, he pens “Of the Sons of Master and Man.” In it he discusses physical proximity, economic strategy, and politics—the power of the ballot in every state. He reveals the police system as designed to control slaves and how courts can be the means of re-enslaving Blacks. Equally important, he addresses social contact stating that “there is almost no community of intellectual life or point of transference where the thoughts and feelings of one race can come into direct contact and sympathy with thoughts and feelings of the other.” He concludes that “the future of the South depends on the ability of the representatives of these opposing views to see and appreciate and sympathize with each other’s position.” Dubois was speaking to the soul of a nation. He was not completely heard then, but we should really listen and take action to restore or even discover the true soul of America now.
For Biden’s clarion “soul” call to resonate with Black men it has to be about accountability than the political rhetoric and empty promises portrayed by man public officials. And, he must give a more honest account of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, now known as the 1994 Crime Law.
On May 14, 2019 during one of his events, Biden, was questioned about the bill’s intended punishments. His response was, “let’s get something straight: 92 out of every 100 prisoners end up behind bars are in a state prison, not a federal prison. This idea that the crime bill generated mass incarceration—it did not generate mass incarceration.” Nah, Joe, you’ve got to come better than that. According to the Sentencing Project’s June 2010 Felony Disenfranchisement: A Primer, currently one out of 13 Blacks can’t vote due to a felony connection. Want to guess how many are Black men? Where’s the federal bill to, rightful, protect and restore their voting right?
The Crime Law, also, separated fathers (and mothers) from children, community and work. And, yes, it was the catalyst for harsh sentencing guidelines that placed Black men behind bars in states, that still, disenfranchised their voting right. T-Bone got locked up over a dime bag and Ray-Ray for transporting firearms. However, both industries are being run by ‘the man’ not Black men. They were both trying to catch a piece of the American Dream, but instead they got 20 to life, taking away their promise and some of the hopes of their children.
The Bible, in Genesis chapter 2, says that God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. Then man became a living soul. That soul became the father of nations. A Biden vote, for a Biden win, has the potential to breathe life into Black men, so that they an become vital leaders and father of within nation.
Black men are more interested in the answer to Plato’s Republic than more questions. And, rather than taking Socrates’ a long way around to define justice as the virtues of human beings in a city, it is time for America to create scales of economic, political and social justice that are leaning toward the uplift Black men, instead of structural racism that works to their detriment. No longer are Black men satisfied being fishermen; it’s time to own oceans. No longer is being the vast majority of the NFL’s athletic talent sufficient, it’s for ownership. Black men want access to flowing veins and arteries to create fulfilling lives, which woven together comprise a nation with rhythm and balance.
With eyes on that type of future, I certainly believe that Black men will head to the poll for Biden, and leave borrowing from the departing words of Soul Train’s host Don Cornelius, “we wish you love, peace and soul, Joe.”
The Reverend Professor Keith Magee is a London-based public intellectual with a focus on social justice and public theology. He is visiting professor of social justice at Newcastle University, senior fellow in culture and justice at University College London, and serves in pastoral leadership at The Berachah Church. He writes and speaks, globally, on issues of race, religion and politics. For more information, visit www.4justicesake.org or follow him on social media @keithlmagee.
