David Goodman’s brother Andrew was murdered while attempting to register African-American voters. Andrew was just 20, his brother David three years younger.
Andrew was lynched in June 1964, along with Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, by the townsfolk of Philadelphia, Mississippi. There were 18 in the killing party—and it was indeed a party, organized by the Exalted Grand Cyclops of the Meridian White Knights, the local Ku Klux Klan affiliate, joined by the police chief and local luminaries.
Goodman had joined Schwerner and Chaney to visit the Mt. Zion Baptist Church. Or what was left of it. The church was burnt down right after locals found out Schwerner and Chaney had offered to help the Black congregants register to vote.
The lynch mob set an ambush, rightly assuming the three college students, two New York Jews and a local Black man—not a popular combination in Mississippi then or now—would return to the burnt church.
After they beat Chaney, they shot him and his two friends, then covered them with mud. Andrew was buried still alive. Their bodies were not discovered for two months. Only one killer was arrested and convicted—42 years later.
The killings were meant to be a lesson.
In some places, the Klan made its point by hanging effigies by the neck from bridges.
They did not always use effigies. Up through 1968, the Klan and other White Citizens Councils, as they called themselves, lynched 3,446 Black men.
But the killers made a mistake. David Goodman, an engineering student who had once ignored politics, has dedicated the half century of his life since the murders to registering Black voters on a scale his brother could only dream of. The Andrew Goodman Foundation operates in Jim Crow states . . . including Michigan and Wisconsin.
The Foundation also acts to protect that other group targeted by voting apartheid: college students.
☐ ☐ ☐
Trump’s Wisconsin win was a shock to the Democratic Party—but then, the Democratic Party is always shocked—because Wisconsin was supposed to be a safe state for Clinton. Her husband had won Wisconsin twice. In fact, Democrats had crushed it seven elections in a row, helped by the massive vote from the famously progressive, activist University of Wisconsin student population.
But then, on Election Day 2016, a giant hunk of the student vote simply . . . vanished. And the Milwaukee Black vote also plummeted.
And so, Trump is President.
The first thing I noticed was that, while the rest of the nation had massive voter turnout in 2016, in this down-to-the-wire state, voting fell off a cliff. In Black-majority Milwaukee, turnout plummeted from 66% to 56% of the voting age population. That’s strange.
And Wisconsin’s student vote evaporated. Nationwide, only two states recorded a drop in student voting. Wisconsin’s drop was breathtaking. In-precinct voting by students declined by a third, from 67% to 49%.
It had, to Goodman, the smell of Mississippi burning.
They didn’t need to drag the local lakes to find the missing students and Black voters. They were disappeared in plain sight by the Republican legislature under laws crafted by Wisconsin’s radical-right Governor, Scott Walker.
One new law required a government photo ID to vote. But the photo ID issued by the state to its 182,000 University of Wisconsin students did not qualify them for voting nor for registration.
How brilliant is that? Gun permits could be used to vote; but not student ID. Carry a weapon, good. Carry a book, forget it.
A Wisconsin driver’s license would do. But not everyone has a license. Who doesn’t drive? Students in Madison and low-income urban voters, i.e., the Black population of Milwaukee.
What was particularly devastating was that the law was ordered into effect by a court only two weeks before the 2016 election. Even those who knew of the change had little time to correct their lack of paperwork, even if they could.
Elections Commissioner Ann Jacobs suggests the University can simply issue ID that allows students to vote . . . but, she noted, just before he lost re-election, Republican Gov. Walker appointed the University Regents—who would not correct the IDs to mint another 100,000 Democrats.
In 2016, a student, if they found out about the last-minute ID requirement, could hunt down a university center that would issue a special voting ID. However, that would not have been good enough to vote. The Walker law requires that the special student ID
must be presented with proof of current enrollment like a tuition fee receipt or letter verifying enrollment.
Got that?
In 2016, most students voted by mail, thinking this was a way around the ID law. But ballots not mailed with an ID and proof of school enrollment would be cancelled and dumped—and the voter wouldn’t know it.
University of Wisconsin professors Michael DeCrecenzo and Kenneth Mayer wanted to find out about the mysterious massive drop in 2016 turnout. They conducted an extraordinary survey, contacting thousands of non-voters directly. They asked each registrant why they did not, or could not, vote.
They discovered that 28,000 citizens in just two cities, Milwaukee and Madison, were blocked by the ID requirement. (This 28,000 excludes the majority of voters without proper ID who did not vote for other reasons, such as long lines—or who just didn’t give a damn about voting.)
Some folks did in fact have the ID required, but the law is so complex and little-explained that thousands thought they did not have acceptable ID. One in 11 Black voters did not have the right ID, but more than twice that many thought they didn’t, so did not show up at the polls.
Take a look at this chart from the study. The ID law was three times as likely to block or deter African-Americans as whites.
It gets worse. The study measured a privileged group: those who had already registered before the ID law went into place, before the law’s jaws snapped closed in 2016. Beginning in 2016, you could not register without the special ID—another bite out of the youth vote bloc. The National Study for Learning, Voting and Engagement found that the eligible student vote in Madison dropped from 45% in 2012 to just 37% in the Clinton-Trump race.
I know: this is an awful lot of detail, a lot of numbers. But that’s how it’s done. It’s not about some kid in Moscow fiddling with vote machine software.
The Black vote in Wisconsin fell by a mind-blowing 24.5% between 2012 and 2016 when the ID law hit. The loss of Black and student votes due to the ID law cost at minimum 61,274 votes, almost three times Trump’s plurality. And that estimate of the loss is low. I’ve left out the Hispanic voters who are growing near to the size of the Black population. Any way you calculate it, the show-me-your-papers ID tactic won Wisconsin, not the voters.
According to The Survey of the Performance of American Elections (SPAE), poll workers nationwide demand that first-time voters who are Black produce ID 64% of the time, more than twice as often as for first-time white voters . . . and ten times more often than for white returning voters.
JIM CROWING STUDENTS FROM WISCONSIN TO FLORIDA TO CAROLINA
That was 2016. But this book is about the theft of 2020.
Wisconsin Democrats now have the Governor’s mansion, but the voting laws are kept medieval by a rabidly partisan Republican legislature.
In 2020, the Goodman Foundation sued the state for violating the 26th Amendment. You know the 26th Amendment? I had to Google it. It’s the one we won during the War in Vietnam. The Amendment lowered the national voting age to 18. It was argued that if you can get drafted for Vietnam at 18, you should have the right to vote at 18. (Though the late Dick Gregory noted, “If they can send you to Vietnam at 18, you need to vote at 16.”)
The Wisconsin ID law is so clearly harmful to the 18-to-21 vote, Goodman’s suit argues, it violates the 26th Amendment.
Goodman’s lawsuit could prevent the theft of Wisconsin in 2020. It’s an argument Goodman used with some success in Florida. There, Republican officials allowed the placement of early voting stations in country clubs, gun ranges, evangelical church buildings, massage parlors, wherever . . . but not on college campuses—by edict of the GOP successor to Secretary of State Katherine Harris.
Goodman’s lawyers helped win a court order permitting voting stations on college campuses. Hooray. Well, partial hooray. Permission to have a voting station is not a requirement.
It is left to each of Florida’s 67 counties’ discretion to decide if they want students to have a reasonable chance of voting. Most counties are controlled by Republicans and—surprise!—not one agreed to allow campus voting. The result: Only 12 colleges in Florida have been allowed early voting stations.
This was particularly brutal for the students at Miami-Dade College (MDC), with over 100,000 students, a city by itself—without one early polling station. And the County Registrar, a Republican, certainly knew that MDC had the largest Hispanic student population of any school in America, and the third-largest Black student population.
But, in 2018, an Andrew Goodman scholar, 20-year-old Rebecca Diaz, organized MDC students to march on the GOP Registrar and forced the county to open a voting station.
Can the action of this one voter change the outcome of the 2020 election? Yes. In fact, that’s the only way it will happen—one activist at a time. (Look, I know you’re too busy. So am I. Let’s just hope there are more Rebecca Diazes out there, and a few thousand more David Goodmans.)
Is there work to do? Yes, even in Miami, where the biggest single campus, Florida International University, with an 89% non-white student population, is still without an early voting station.
☐ ☐ ☐
North Carolina is another battleground state. Rather than battle in a war of ideas, the Republican legislature in 2013 banned voting on college campuses. And the law added a nice little touch. Until its passage, North Carolina’s high school students were handed a voter registration form at their graduation ceremonies along with their diplomas.
Then the Republican not only took away graduates’ registration forms, even the act of attempting to register a student on a high school campus was made a crime.
No smoking dope, no registering voters. God Bless America.