Courtesy of Nina Johnson
Lewis & Clark Law School hosted its annual Martin Luther King Jr. Endowed Lecture on Jan. 19. This year’s speaker was Carol Anderson who spoke on “The Strangling of American Democracy”.
Anderson is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of African American Studies at Emory University with a long list of associations: she’s a member of the Society of American Historians, a W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Anderson is also the author of several books on racial justice and equality including “White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide” and “One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy.”
LC President Robin Holmes-Sullivan opened the lecture by welcoming everyone and drawing attention to the legacy of King.
“I just want to take a moment to remember Dr. King. One of my favorite quotes seems particularly noteworthy to our current situation. He said, ‘The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.’ As we are confronted daily with direct challenges to our democracy and rule of law, let us remember that we can take action. At Lewis & Clark, we’re here to make change that matters, and I know the law school, our graduate school and our undergraduate college all share that commitment,” she said.
LC Law School Dean Alicia Ouellette introduced Anderson, who took the stage as the audience applauded. She began her lecture by outlining the topics she would cover and how she developed her research interests.
“What I’m going to do today is talk about white rage and what it is, and the way that it plays itself out in terms of policy,” she said. “How does a Black woman (come) to white rage? So it was 1999, and I’m watching television, and Amadou Diallo was gunned down in New York City. 41 bullets for an unarmed man. And that was horrific enough, but then I’m watching Nightline and Mayor Rudy Giuliani is on. And he’s talking about ‘my policies are working. The new NYPD is the most restrained and the most disciplined police force out there.’”
Anderson described her reaction at that moment to hearing Giuliani’s statements.
“I’m shaking my head — that is not restraint. That is not discipline. But he said, ‘my policies are working.’ And so as a scholar, I kept working. I kept researching, I kept writing and I kept thinking,” she said.
Anderson said she had a similar experience in 2014 watching political commentary on various media outlets in the wake of the riots in Ferguson, MS, following the murder of unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown by a white police officer.
“They were all saying the same thing. ‘Look at Black folks burning up where they live. Can’t you believe Black folks are burning up where they live? Who burns up where they live? Look at all that Black rage,’” she said. “And so I’m shaking my head, almost like Amy Winehouse: ‘no, no, no.’ I said we’re not looking at Black rage, we’re looking at white rage. And then I just started typing.”
She felt that the systemic roots of the racial unrest had gone ignored.
“One of the things about white rage is we are always so focused on the flames that we miss the kindling. So let’s talk about the kindling that happened in Ferguson, Missouri,” she said.
Anderson highlighted systemic injustices in the city, noting that in 2013, though roughly 60% of the city’s population was African American, Black voter turnout was 6%. She said that the education system in the city was also deeply flawed, scoring only ten points out of a possible 140 in the state’s 2014 district assessment.
She added that the city budgeted roughly 25% of its total revenue from fines and fees, which were overwhelmingly paid by Black residents — upon whom laws such as speed limits were enforced with extreme rigidity, often for minor infractions. Failure to pay fines resulted in bench warrants, meaning that subsequent minor traffic stops could, and often did, lead to arrest and incarceration.
“And so what became clear to me was that this isn’t visible violence. This is bureaucratic violence. This is policy violence. And so this white rage works subtly, smoothly, corrosively, imperceptibly. And the trigger for white rage isn’t necessarily the presence of Black folk. It is Black folk with ambition. Black folk who thrive. Black folk who refuse to accept subjugation,” she said.
She cited Barbara Johns, a teenage girl who led a strike at her high school in Prince Edward County, Virginia in 1951 to protest overcrowded, inadequate conditions — such as the use of tar paper shacks as classrooms — in her all-Black high school, as an example. Johns’ activism led to the desegregation of schools.
Anderson used Johns’ activism as a historical throughline for her argument that Black political participation has consistently been met with policy backlash rather than overt violence. Rather than relying on explicitly racist laws, Anderson argued, modern voter suppression operates through seemingly neutral mechanisms that disproportionately affect communities of color.
She traced this pattern back to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color or language-minority status in election registration and voting. Prior to its passage, Anderson noted, Black voter registration in some Southern counties hovered near zero, while white registration exceeded 100% due to corrupt recordkeeping practices. Within two years of the Act’s implementation, Black voter registration in Mississippi jumped from roughly 6% to nearly 60%.
According to Anderson, that backlash intensified through a combination of legislative changes and Supreme Court decisions that gradually weakened the Voting Rights Act’s enforcement mechanisms. She pointed to the 2013 Supreme Court decision Shelby County v. Holder as a turning point — the decision invalidated the Act’s preclearance requirement that historically discriminatory jurisdictions needed federal approval for voting law changes.
“John Roberts said racism is a thing of the past,” Anderson said. “With the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act in 2006, the U.S. Department of Justice laid before Congress almost 800 changes that they had blocked. Not since the start of the Voting Rights Act, in 1965, but with the reorganization in 1982. Almost 800 changes that had been blocked from these jurisdictions that were under the agency of the Voting Rights Act. They were blocked because they were racially discriminatory. So I’m not clear how in 2013, you can ignore that evidence from 2006 — over 800 changes — and say ‘We’re good.’”
Following the Shelby County decision, Anderson said, states moved quickly to implement restrictive voting laws previously blocked by the federal government. In Texas, for example, voter ID laws accepted gun licenses but rejected student IDs, a distinction Anderson argued disproportionately disadvantaged voters of color.
Anderson also highlighted the myth of widespread voter fraud, which she described as a recurring justification for restrictive voting laws. Citing a comprehensive study of U.S. elections over a 15-year period, she noted that researchers found only 31 confirmed cases of in-person voter impersonation out of roughly 1 billion ballots cast.
She further detailed how early voting restrictions and polling site closures disproportionately burden working-class voters, particularly in urban areas. In Indiana, Anderson said, the state legislature limited early voting locations in counties with large Black populations, resulting in a 27% drop in Black voter turnout in one county, while turnout in predominantly white counties increased dramatically.
She stressed that attempts at deterring Black votes made them all the more important.
“That’s where we have to be. Because they want us to leave. The whole thing about making voting so difficult is to dissuade people from actually voting,” she said.
Anderson drew historical parallels between modern voter suppression tactics and the literacy tests and poll taxes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Though the language has changed, she argued, the underlying logic remains the same.
She pointed to Florida’s felony disenfranchisement laws as a contemporary example. Prior to a 2018 ballot initiative, nearly one in four Black adults in the state were barred from voting due to past felony convictions. Though voters approved restoring voting rights to most formerly incarcerated individuals, the state legislature later required the payment of all outstanding fines and fees before eligibility could be restored. Under this new legislation, the state was not required to tell individuals how much money they owed. The Supreme Court upheld this legislation.
“The Court ruled that this is not a poll tax. And that Florida doesn’t have to tell you how much you owe. So to me, it’s like the worst of the poll tax and the literacy test,” she said.
Anderson concluded by situating the current moment within what she described as the “next wave” of white rage, following the nationwide protests after the murder of George Floyd and record voter turnout in the 2020 election. She argued that false claims of election fraud and subsequent voting restrictions were direct responses to expanded democratic participation.
“This nation had a hunger to figure this thing (racism) out,” she said. “You had record-breaking turnout in that 2020 election. That led to January 6, because you kept hearing from the right wing, ‘They stole the election in Atlanta. They stole the election in Philadelphia. They stole the election in Milwaukee.’ No one said they stole the election in Salt Lake City.”
Following the lecture, Anderson participated in a question-and-answer session with the audience, addressing topics ranging from gerrymandering to the relationship between race and the Second Amendment. She urged the audience to remain engaged even when the political process feels discouraging.
Despite the sobering historical arc of her lecture, Anderson emphasized that voter suppression itself is evidence of political power. Efforts to restrict access to the ballot, she argued, would not exist if voting did not matter.
“I tell my students, ‘you do not see your power.’ Because they would not be coming for your vote if you did not have that power. And when we retreat, that’s when bad things happen,” Anderson said.
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