Episode 3: Voting Rights and Voting Wrongs with Robert Korstad and James Leloudis

The South is poised to once again play a pivotal role in this year’s presidential election.

From the end of the Civil War right up until today, North Carolina has served as a battleground state between the majority of people that at various points have pushed for transformational change and a powerful minority bent on perpetuating divisions along racial, gender and class lines through state-sanctioned and vigilante violence or exclusion dressed up as political moderation.

Despite being lauded as a leader of the progressive, so-called New South, North Carolina led the way in constructing Jim Crow segregation following Reconstruction, resisted the integration of public schools after the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision striking down separate but equal and boasted more Ku Klux Klan members at the height of the Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s than all the other Southern states combined.

More recently, following the Republican takeover of the state legislature in 2010, special interest groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council targetted the Tar Heel state to serve as a laboratory for new and increasingly sophisticated ways of using policy to preserve power in the hands of the few through gerrymandering and by restricting people, primarily people of color, from exercising their right to vote.

Unfortunately, the Southern predicament has become the scourge of the nation. Variations of the voter suppression tactics used in North Carolina have been deployed throughout the country and they have been on full display during the coronavirus pandemic. Formerly incarcerated people in Florida were recently denied access to the ballot box because of outstanding fines. The closure of polling sites in Milwaukee during the April primary election forced Black and Latinx people to wait in long lines to vote at grave risk to their health. On the national level, recent cuts to the United States Postal Service could play a major role in the outcome of the 2020 presidential election when an estimated 80 million Americans are expected to vote by mail.

In this week's episode, host Jonathan Michels talks with Robert Korstad and James Leloudis to examine these recent attacks on our democracy through the lens of the long struggle for voting rights in North Carolina. Korstad is a professor emeritus of public policy at Duke University and Leloudis is a professor of history at UNC-Chapel Hill. They just wrote a new book called Fragile Democracy: The Struggle Over Race and Voting Rights in North Carolina.

For a transcription of this episode, please click here.

Show notes:

• Fragile Democracy digital exhibit
• “State for Sale” New Yorker article about how conservative multimillionaire Art Pope helped turn North Carolina into a laboratory for implementing right-wing policies, including voter suppression measures
• “It’s Monday and the South is Rising” short documentary about the Moral Monday movement