How to Achieve a True Multiracial Democracy

Sometimes a book persuades you intellectually while simultaneously galvanizing hope and optimism

Not long ago, a friend expressed surprise that I had not yet read How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good (2022), by Steve Phillips, a longtime political activist, writer, and founder of Democracy in Color.

My friend said it was a seminal, must-read book, one that contains the wisdom and strategy we need to break through our present era of Jim Crow 2.0 in order to secure the multiracial democracy that is, undeniably, the fate and destiny of this always clumsily progressing nation.

So I read it once—and then again, marking up the text and taking notes. And, I must say, How We Win the Civil War has changed my outlook on the work to be done.

I continue to believe that an authoritarian demagogue in the White House constitutes American democracy’s greatest danger. Yet, one way to stamp them out and to ensure that just and ethical multiracial democracy steamrolls over the sad forces of white supremacy is to strategically expand the vote in the right places—and, in so doing, to convert red districts to blue because if all eligible voters in easy-to-turn districts and states indeed get registered, turn out, and cast ballots that is precisely what will happen in the U.S.: the color of things will change.

As Phillips connects the dots from the 1860s to today, “The battery of voter suppression legislation passed in 2021 in states with growing numbers of people of color is simply part of a long and proud tradition of racists ruthlessly revising any laws that could conceivably diminish white power.”

That’s the persisting civil war that must be won: white nationalism vs. a true democracy of all Americans eligible to vote.

The trouble started not with backlash against Barack Obama or the racist voter suppression bills following Trump’s loss of the 2020 presidential election. It goes back to white power’s holy terror over the 15th Amendment adopted in February of 1870.

That amendment gave Black men the right to vote from sea to shining sea: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

Almost immediately, Machiavellian and even murderous maneuvers against Black Americans’ right to vote commenced, especially in the South—maneuvers not too different from those deployed today to the same ends.

Rather than let democracy follow its natural course of expansion, no matter its racial make-up, white nationalists rigged the system against African Americans, leaning on organizations like the KKK to enforce their tyranny.

Now let me succinctly present to you some of ways white power, particularly in the South, desperately fought to repress the Black vote from the 1870s to the 1970s. In this history, you will see that what is happening now with voter suppression is nothing new under the sun. It’s from the same revanchist white supremacy playbook that ruined Reconstruction in the 1870s and responded to the civil rights movement by “ruthlessly rewriting the laws,” as Phillips puts it.

This is the first of two essays about how the United States can achieve a true multiracial, gender-equal democracy. This piece lays out some of the history of the age-old civil war on the Black vote being waged by white nationalists. The next one will outline the Stacey Abrams’ method for winning the civil war and securing a bright democratic future.

The Driving Force of White Supremacy

Is it possible that the same racial worldview espoused by Confederate vice president Alexander H. Stephens in 1861 continues to be the driving force behind voter suppression today?

In his notorious “Cornerstone Speech,” Stephens explained that the new Confederate government’s “foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is a natural and normal condition.” 

A century later, in 1962, Alabama Governor George Wallace put it this way: “In the name of the greatest people that ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust, and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

These backwards views of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”—think of it as “voter suppression now, voter suppression tomorrow, and voter suppression forever”—indeed explain American history as well as a forward-moving legacy like the Declaration of Independence’s promise that “all men are created equal.”

You already know about the long history of the South’s imposition of literacy tests and poll taxes on voting as a common means of suppressing Black political power. Here are four other ways white supremacists fiercely combatted the rise of equality and multiracial democracy in the century between the 1870s and 1970s. You’ll notice that some of them are eerily similar to the tactics practiced by many Republican state legislatures today.

The Eight Box Law

Not entirely different from the culture of lying that Donald Trump unleashed on American politics in late 2015, South Carolina resorted to a scheme of blatant lying in order to disenfranchise tens of thousands of Black voters in the 1880s.

The state passed the “Eight Box Law” in 1882 in order to ensure white supremacy without violating the 15th Amendment. The law provided for separate ballot boxes for each of eight offices, including state senators and representatives, congressmen, governor, and other statewide offices.

The ballot boxes were labeled by name, and—here’s the linchpin—any ballot cast in the wrong box was thrown out. Election managers were required to read the label to any illiterate voters, and that’s where the strategic lying came in. Those managers read aloud the correct name of the ballot box to illiterate white voters, but false names to illiterate Blacks, disqualifying their votes.

One historian estimates that this method of voter suppression in South Carolina reduced the total number of Black voters from 58,000 to 14,000.

Whites Only Primaries

Another more widespread means of voter suppression practiced in at least eight Southern states during the 1890s and continuing into the early 20th century was the “whites only primary.” Federal law, like the 15th Amendment, governs general elections, but not primaries. These pre-elections are considered party affairs, outside the scope of most federal and even state law.

Phillips cites Carol Anderson’s book One Person, No Vote to explain the scheme:

Because the South was a one-party region, whoever won in the spring would certainly be the victor in November. As long as the all-important and decisive primary was a whites-only affair, the results would be foreordained . . . With no federal interference and a hermetically sealed party system, the white primary became a masterful way to “emasculate politically the entire body of Negro voters.” . . . And then a paper-thin aura of legality was achieved because blacks were welcome to vote in the irrelevant and perfunctory general election.

Grandfather Clauses

This one is hard to believe, but in order to permit whites but not Blacks to circumvent poll taxes and literacy tests, seven states in the South between the years of 1895 and 1910 imposed a “grandfather clause” on these conditions for voting.

What the clause stated is that if your relatives voted in elections before the Civil War you were exempt from the restrictive conditions of taxes and tests. Obviously, no Black American in the South voted prior to the Civil War, so the grandfather clauses were merely a dirty trick for nullify Black voting rights.

Domestic Terrorism and Murder

The worst of all tactics for disenfranchising African Americans in the century after the Civil War was domestic terrorism, including lynching and other forms of murder designed to intimate Blacks and keep them from political activism.

The KKK went to work months after the surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox in 1865, targeting perceived Black troublemakers, and after the civil rights advancements of the late 1950s and early 1960s a new group, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, took up the mantle of violence with renewed vigor. Founded in 1964, the White Knights had an estimated ten thousand members at its peak, and the FBI attributes nine murders and 300 beatings, bombings, and burnings to the group.

The Success Story of Stacey Abrams

How do we win this ongoing civil war and finally establish a true multiracial democracy? Demographics are entirely on the side of multiracial democracy. The nation is composed of approximately 40% people of color today, and there is a critical mass of white liberals who believe in the cause of equality and multiracial democracy with sufficient voting power to push this number well over the 50% mark.

It’s simply a matter of staying ahead of the voter suppression backlash and getting out the vote in order to turn critical red districts to blue. In a follow-up essay next week, I will outline the way forward according to Phillips, highlighting the success story of Stacey Abrams in Georgia as a model for the entire nation.

All citations are from Steve Phillips, How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good (2022).