Black Women Denied Her Right to Vote

Racist Republicans in Tennessee have their first success with the new “Voter ID” requirement: A 96-year-old black lady who has voted in all but one election (in 1960) that she was legally eligible to vote in has been denied the right to take part in democracy. Why? Oh, just some piece of missing paperwork. That’s the point of “Voter ID,” to stop people you don’t want voting — the poor, minorities, take your pick! — on a technicality. This is how so many black Americans were denied the vote in the South for a hundred years after being “emancipated.”


Dorothy Cooper, who worked her whole life as a housemaid, went down to see the authorities because she’d heard Tennessee’s racist new law would require a pile of documents for those who tried to vote in the future. And she was denied a Voter ID by a clerk at the counter, just as planned by the evil legislators who approved the law:

That morning, Cooper slipped a rent receipt, a copy of her lease, her voter registration card and her birth certificate into a Manila envelope. Typewritten on the birth certificate was her maiden name, Dorothy Alexander.
“But I didn’t have my marriage certificate,” Cooper said Tuesday afternoon, and that was the reason the clerk said she was denied a free voter ID at the Cherokee Boulevard Driver Service Center.
“I don’t know what difference it makes,” Cooper said.

I know what difference it makes. Dorothy Cooper is African-American.