South African artist Thokozani Mthiyane, center, poses with students from the Ember Charter School in Brooklyn, N.Y. after an art workshop in Johannesburg on Sept. 29, 2018. Dozens of students from a Brooklyn charter school are visiting South Africa to explore African cultures and South Africa’s journey from racial tension to reconciliation. (AP Photo/Christopher Torchia) (AP Photo/Christopher Torchia)
South African artist Thokozani Mthiyane told dozens of children from a Brooklyn school to close their eyes and imagine “the worst scenario that you can.”
Then he told his hushed audience at a Johannesburg art gallery to “find a way out,” through imagined trees and sky, to “where we would like to be.”
That was his enigmatic answer to a question about why he is an artist, delivered during a workshop for visiting American students from low-income families at the Ember Charter School in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Bed-Stuy is known for its African-American heritage, and the trip is a chance to expose the children to African cultures and South Africa’s journey from racial tension to reconciliation.
The children also visited the Constitutional Court building, constructed in part from bricks that were originally part of a prison during white minority rule known as apartheid.
“We have an opportunity to explode their minds,” said school founder Rafiq Kalam Id-Din.
Mthiyane told the dozens of children, many in their early teens, about his eclectic influences — artists Mark Rothko and Jean-Michel Basquiat, poet Langston Hughes — and encouraged them to find inspiration within themselves.
“How do you feel?” he asked after a drawing exercise.
“It made me feel excited to see what the outcome would be,” one student said to applause.
A student asked: “Did you live through apartheid and if so, what was that like?”
Yes, Mthiyane replied. He said the system that ended in 1994 with all-race elections made him ask “taboo” questions about why it existed.
Apartheid, he said, was bad not just for the people it ostracized but also for “the person who’s exercising that power over you.”
WARNER ROBINS, Ga. — Sitting on the wooden pews of a small white brick church on a hot Wednesday afternoon in central Georgia, a group of residents gathered to chat about the upcoming governor’s race and the issues concerning them in their community, from economic development to health care to infrastructure.
A particular topic of interest was a strategy for voter turnout — and how to fight the barriers to it — in what could be a pivotal midterm election.
“We’ve got to get out to the nursing homes, tell the DJ if that’s what we’ve got to do to get to the young folks,” said Houston County NAACP Vice President Jonathan Johnson, thinking aloud as the audience nodded in agreement. “We could start a cookout . If we could do that as a community, we could make a big difference in this election.”
These were not the rural voters who have gotten so much attention after helping elect President Donald Trump in 2016. They are the black rural voters living in red states. They’re staunchly Democratic even as they’re surrounded by white voters who are almost all Republicans. And they’re often overlooked by big-name candidates from both parties.
“There’s a narrative that is out in the world right now around what rural America looks like, and it completely erases the existence of black rural folks,” said Tamika Middleton, organizing director for Care in Action, a domestic workers advocacy group, in attendance at the church gathering. “We exist. There’s never been black folks who were not fighting and resisting in the rural South.”
The Black Belt’s overlap with Trump country could factor into the elections across the South next month, including competitive races for the governor’s mansion in Florida and the Senate in Mississippi. That raises the possibility that black rural voters will have an unusual opportunity to make an impact on statewide races.
But it’s Georgia where black rural voters could be especially important as Stacey Abrams campaigns to become the nation’s first black female governor. A Mississippi native who moved to Georgia as a child, Abrams is the first Democrat in years to have a real chance of winning the governor’s race. And from the beginning, when she launched her campaign in south Georgia’s Dougherty County, she’s made outreach to rural voters a key part of her strategy.
“Since the beginning of the campaign, Stacey Abrams has been focused on reaching out to a broad coalition of voters in every part of the state, including rural communities of color who have been left behind for too long,” said Lauren Groh-Wargo, Abrams’ campaign manager.
Statewide, a third of rural Georgians are people of color, and Abrams has been making her case to black rural voters in churches like the one in Warner Robins. In recent months, she has spent time in towns like Riceboro, Americus, Thomasville, Fort Valley and Cordele — far from the usual Democratic campaign stops like Atlanta, Savannah, Macon and Albany.
During the primary, Abrams’ efforts paid off in places like predominantly black Washington County, where she campaigned in May. Turnout there nearly doubled from four years earlier, with Abrams getting 69 percent of the vote this spring, according to turnout data from the Georgia secretary of state.
Rural blacks’ priorities often differ from those of their urban counterparts. Many suffer from health disparities, including obesity, maternal mortality, diabetes and sickle cell, living in regions with few hospitals, governed by state officials who have rejected the expansion of Medicaid that would help them afford treatment. The Black Belt was historically an agricultural region that remains starved for economic development, and the class and power divide that began during slavery still persists along racial lines in many communities.
While the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 politically changed the region with the onslaught of black public elected officials, another result was voter suppression, said Georgia State University historian Maurice Hobson.
“It’s a black population that has been so mistreated and so marginalized by the political system that many people are like, ‘My vote doesn’t count anyway,'” Hobson said. “There is a sense of hopelessness.”
That dynamic has paralyzed some blacks in the South, but this fall’s midterms could signal a shift among those voters and a way forward for Democrats seeking their votes.
“Our people have voted year after year after year, and they have not seen their lives change,” said LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund, which is touring the black South to register and turn out voters this cycle, told the crowd in Warner Robins. “We got a black woman that is the Democratic nominee at the top of the ticket in a state where we couldn’t even vote . Y’all are standing on land where our people died as slaves . We gotta remember that.”
Kattie Kendrick, former Peach County Democratic Party chairwoman, who was on a recent tour stop in Fort Valley, Georgia, said that mobilizing voters in her part of the state has been challenging but that outside interest could help to energize them.
“We do not necessarily unite, but when other people know that the black people in Peach County and throughout rural Georgia matter, that makes a difference,” Kendrick said.
Down the road in Terrell County, the Rev. Ezekiel Holley plotted how to get nearly 1,000 of his neighbors who typically vote in presidential elections to show up for the midterms. Nicknamed “Terrible Terrell,” three churches in the county were burned in the 1950s to keep blacks from voting. Today, Holley said, the problem is apathy and frustration with elected officials who forget they can’t see a doctor or need their roads paved.
“Most of our citizens feel that people we have elected have let us down,” he explained. “They get elected and forget about who elected them and their platform. So why should I keep on voting for you?”
“The majority of the national politicians feel that … they don’t have to worry about little rural places. Most folks are concentrating on metro Atlanta more than the rest of Georgia. Hopefully they’re getting the picture now,” Holley said.
Holley went to see Abrams speak at a campaign event earlier this month with former President Jimmy Carter in his hometown of Plains. The pair talked about Medicaid expansion, which Holley believes will bring jobs, better health conditions and industry into the state. That she announced her plans there said to him that she cares about his corner of the state.
It’s a message Holley plans to take to the registered voters he hopes to help turn out in Terrell County in the coming few weeks, but he’s still not sure whether they will show up.
“I can’t give a good answer on that yet,” he said. “People are excited, but Nov. 6 is going to tell the story.”
With all of her necessary documentation, University of Wisconsin-Madison student Brooke Evans arrived at her polling place on Nov. 8, 2016, for the presidential election. For her, voting that day meant not only casting a ballot for the first female presidential candidate with a real shot of winning, but having a voice in a society in which homeless people such as herself were marginalized.
“There’s something about voting that makes you very real,” Evans said.
But when poll workers examined her mailing address under the guidelines of the Wisconsin voter ID law enacted in 2015, the University of Wisconsin-Madison philosophy major initially was barred from voting due to confusion over her address.
The law requires Wisconsin residents to present certain forms of photo identification to vote but does not require that the ID have the voter’s current address. Such voters must provide proof of their current address — and that is where Evans ran into trouble. She eventually was able to cast a ballot using a campus address she herself had advocated for to help homeless students.
Not only did Evans, as a college student, face increased obstacles under the voter ID law, her homelessness was another barrier — one that almost prevented her from exercising a fundamental right of citizenship.
“I was just really surprised at the hassle I was given,” Evans said.
Over the past 15 years, voting has become increasingly difficult for people such as Evans. A recent PRRI/The Atlantic 2018 Voter Engagement Survey found that 5 percent of Wisconsin residents surveyed said they or someone in their household was told they lacked the proper documentation to vote. (The Joyce Foundation is a funder of the survey and also is a funder of the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism’s coverage of democracy issues.)
A 2014 U.S. Government Accountability Office report concluded that voter ID laws may reduce voter turnout. The report examined 10 studies, as well as turnout in Kansas and Tennessee compared to other states without voter ID laws. The GAO estimated turnout was cut by up to 2.2 percentage points in Kansas and 3.2 percentage points in Tennessee in the 2008 and 2012 elections — with larger decreases seen among specific groups, including those ages 18 to 23 and African-Americans.
Such a margin can be decisive. In 2016, Republican Donald Trump won Wisconsin by less than 1 percentage point, or 47.22 percent of the vote, edging out Democrat Hillary Clinton, who got 46.45 percent. Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel has even credited the photo ID requirement with helping Trump win Wisconsin.
Although requiring voter identification in some form has a history stemming back to the 1950s, laws requiring all voters without exception to have specific forms of identification gained traction in 2005. Currently, 34 states have voter ID laws, with Georgia, Indiana, Kansas and Wisconsin being some of the strictest, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Except for people with religious objections, all voters in Wisconsin are required to present photo identification at the polls. These include state-issued driver’s licenses and identification cards, U.S. passports and certain IDs issued by Wisconsin accredited universities or colleges.
Wisconsin’s photo ID requirement passed in 2011 and was prompted by Republican concerns about ostensible voter fraud. But that justification has been discredited by several subsequent studies and rejected by a federal judge who in 2016 labeled concerns over voter fraud “mostly phantom.”
So after years of legal wrangling, Wisconsin’s photo ID requirement was put in place for the first general statewide election in 2016.
In Wisconsin, voter ID enjoys strong support from the public. Marquette Law School polls taken between 2012 and 2014 showed between 60 and 66 percent of Wisconsin residents surveyed favored requiring a government-issued photo identification card to vote. It should be noted that among those answering the poll in 2014, 99 percent said they had a valid photo ID to vote.
There are still lingering challenges to the law. The federal appeals court in Chicago has not issued a ruling in two cases despite hearing arguments in February 2017.
Analiese Eicher described how, during her time as a UW-Madison student from 2006 to 2011, she and her roommates would walk to the polling places together so that one could vouch for the address of the others. Eicher is program director at One Wisconsin Now, the left-leaning advocacy group suing to overturn the law. The law no longer allows for a “corroborating witness” to provide proof of residency for voters.
Since Eicher’s time in college, ID requirements for students have become much stricter. Of the 13 University of Wisconsin four-year campuses, only four provide campus-issued student IDs that are compliant for voting.
That means out-of-state students and students with no driver’s licenses at those schools must get a second ID card from the university, which is valid for only two years, as well as a Voter Enrollment Verification letter proving they are enrolled in school.
These extra steps were by design: A former GOP staffer testified in 2016 that some Republican senators in a closed session were “giddy” about the prospect of voter ID suppressing votes by Milwaukee residents and college students, both of whom tend to vote Democratic.
Brian Klaas, a fellow in comparative politics at the London School of Economics, said Wisconsin and other states risk delegitimizing their own elections by suppressing participation.
“We have to think really carefully about the barriers that are put into voting in an already-declining voter turnout reality that we live in,” Klaas said.
In the 2016 presidential election, Wisconsin’s overall voter turnout was 70.5 percent, the lowest in two decades.
In Sauk City, a town of around 3,400 residents about 30 miles north of the state Capitol in Madison, voters in the last presidential election without a proper form of identification could obtain free state ID cards at local Division of Motor Vehicles offices — but that office was only open every fifth Wednesday of every month — or just four days in 2016.
“(The voter ID law) made it harder for people to cast a ballot,” said Matt Rothschild, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a nonpartisan political watchdog group. “Making it much harder to vote is about as anti-democratic as you can get.”
Gail Juszczak of Lake Mills said she believes the voter ID law is aimed squarely at people likely to vote Democratic.
“I think that the whole vote and the whole idea of changing this is to exclude certain people from voting,” said Juszczak, interviewed outside her polling place during the Aug. 14 partisan primary election. “And I think it’s definitely hurt the Democratic Party, particularly because more of the Democrats are people who aren’t as able to show identification as clearly.”
The state also initially did a poor job of explaining the changes to residents, said Anita Johnson, a Milwaukee resident who has been educating voters on their rights for 25 years. In 2015, Johnson began working with VoteRiders, a national nonprofit organization specializing in helping people obtain proper identification to vote
“People are confused,” Johnson said. “Some people at the beginning thought that there was an actual voter ID card. There is no such thing as a voter ID card.”
Among those who may have difficulty obtaining proper ID for voting are senior citizens, some of whom lack state-issued driver’s licenses or other documentation, said Gail Bliss, a senior liaison for the League of Women Voters in Dane County.
Kathleen Fullin, who also works for the league, remembers the case of a senior citizen with a driver’s license that had expired since the last general election, which is a valid form of ID for voting under the law.
“Her family had actually contacted the Wisconsin Elections Commission and knew she should be permitted to cast a regular ballot, but the chief inspector at her polling place would not permit it,” Fullin said in an email.
Said Johnson: “Voting should be one of the easiest things you can do. And it allows you to participate in democracy. So when you put up problems like the voter ID law, people say ‘Forget it, I’m not going to vote.’ ”
Challengers to the voter ID law had argued that hundreds of thousands of valid Wisconsin voters — many of them Hispanic, African-American and students — could be barred from casting ballots because of the identification requirement.
A UW-Madison study commissioned by Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell in 2017 estimated that thousands of registered voters in Dane and Milwaukee counties were deterred or prevented from voting because of the photo ID requirement in the 2016 presidential election — a situation that more heavily affected low-income people and African-Americans. The survey was mailed to 2,400 registered voters; 293 were returned.
Based on the sampling weight, UW-Madison political science professor Kenneth Mayer concluded that between 11,701 and 23,252 people did not vote due to confusion over voter ID requirements or lack of proper identification.
Trump won Wisconsin by 22,748 votes.
Mayer’s conclusion was challenged by a free market, limited government legal group, which contended there was no proven linkage between the photo ID requirement and the election results. Will Flanders, research director at the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, said the study “pushed a narrative” of voter suppression but did not actually prove it.
“The most this survey can claim to prove is that the administration of the law could have been improved or that the candidates could have run better ground games,” Flanders wrote.
But, with the 2018 general election approaching, stories like Brooke Evans’ show how easily confusion about voting can jeopardize voting. If it were not for her own efforts to help homeless students, Evans said, she herself might not have been able to vote.
“I ended up relying on (activism) to access basic human rights, like the right to vote.”
The nonprofit news outlet Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism provided this article to The Associated Press through a collaboration with Institute for Nonprofit News.
The city of New Orleans has unveiled a smartphone app tour of sites involved in the slave trade during the 18th and 19th centuries, including the pre-Civil War years during which the city was the nation’s largest slave market.
The project, officially launched on Thursday, is affiliated with New Orleans’ tricentennial celebrations. It comes as cities around the country are shining an unblinking light on slavery and racial violence through such projects as a slavery museum outside New Orleans, an Alabama memorial to victims of lynchings, and the preservation of slave cemeteries.
In announcing the app at a news conference, African-American Mayor LaToya Cantrell said the New Orleans Slave Trade Marker and App Project “will let us honor the lives and dignity of those ancestors who were undoubtedly bought and sold here.”
The city’s Tricentennial Commission reached out to Erin Greenwald, then curator at the Historic New Orleans Commission, and historian Joshua Rothman of the University of Alabama, after they wrote an opinion piece in 2016 “calling out New Orleans for being behind other southern cities” in recognizing “difficult history,” Greenwald said.
The piece noted that Montgomery and Birmingham, Alabama; Charleston, South Carolina; and Memphis, Tennessee, all had historical markers noting slavery, Reconstruction or Civil Rights troubles, but New Orleans had nothing to indicate that 135,000 people of color had been sold there as slaves.
The app has been available for about two months. It includes more than two hours of recorded segments including historical descriptions and readings from interviews with and writings by former slaves.
It opens by naming 11 children — Bill, Isaac, John, Monroe, Lewis, Washington, Robert, Phyllis, Elizabeth, Mary and Lovie — sent from Norfolk, Virginia, to the New Orleans slave market on the ship Ajax in September 1835.
“Ripped from their families, their communities and their homes, they were among more than 1 million enslaved people forcibly relocated” from Maryland, Virginia, Washington and North Carolina to lower Southern states between 1808, when the United States banned the international slave trade, and the end of the Civil War, a narrator states.
In a later segment, an actor reads from a Federal Writers Project interview in 1937 with Virginia Bell, who was born enslaved near Opelousas.
“My mother’s name was Della. That was all, just Della,” she begins. She tells about her father, “sold away” from a wife and five children in Virginia. “I don’t know what became of his family back in Virginia, because when we was freed, he stayed with us,” she said.
The stops include five with markers created for this project — a sixth is underway — and two with markers created by another group. Unlike state historic markers, those made for the project are mounted directly on buildings and topped with the project’s logo: a black man, woman and child around an auction block behind which a white man has raised a gavel.
If all the stops are taken in their listed order, the tour covers nearly 4 miles (6.4 kilometers), including more than a mile of backtracking. A map navigation button can be used to find nearby sites, with pop-up boxes to show each site’s name. That in turn will show an image, a list of audio tracks for the site, and directions to the next.
Nelson Mandela’s widow challenged world leaders celebrating his life on Monday to put their egos and partisan politics aside and honor his legacy by ending the “senseless violence” plaguing too much of the world.
“History will judge you should you stagnate too long in inaction,” Graca Machel told a U.N. “peace summit” commemorating the 100th anniversary of Mandela’s birth. “Humankind will hold you accountable should you allow suffering to continue on your watch.”
With peace a scarce commodity, Machel’s challenge was echoed by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and other leaders who acknowledged the world is far from achieving Mandela’s ideals which also include human rights and global cooperation.
“Today, with human rights under growing pressure around the world, we would be well served by reflecting on the example of this outstanding man,” Guterres said. “We need to face the forces that threaten us with the wisdom, courage and fortitude that Nelson Mandela embodied.”
The tributes to Mandela began with a rare U.N. honor — the unveiling of a $1.8 million statue of the South African anti-apartheid campaigner who became the world’s most famous political prisoner, played a key role in ending white-minority rule, and became president in the country’s first democratic election. The statue is a gift to the United Nations from South Africa.
His arms are outstretched in the statue, as if to embrace people everywhere. But after the cover was pulled off, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, with help from Guterres, placed a small South African flag in his lapel.
The day-long summit, with nearly 160 scheduled speakers, set the stage for Tuesday’s opening of the General Assembly’s annual meeting of world leaders, where conflicts from Syria to South Sudan, rising unilateralism, and tackling a warming planet and growing inequality are among issues expected to be in the spotlight.
With a bang of the gavel by General Assembly President Maria Fernanda Espinosa Garces, the leaders on Monday adopted a political declaration resolving “to move beyond words” to promote peace and prevent, contain and end conflicts. “Dialogue is key, and courage is needed to take the first steps to build trust and gain momentum,” it said.
Garces said Mandela “represents a light of hope for a world still torn apart by conflicts and suffering.”
Like others, she warned of the rise of populism and unilateralism and its threat to the 193-member United Nations.
“Drifting away from multilateralism means jeopardizing the future of our species and our planet,” Garces said. “The world needs a social contract based on shared responsibility, and the only forum that we have to achieve this global compact is the United Nations.”
The appeal for collective action to tackle the world’s many conflicts, hotspots and challenges is being tested by the “America First” agenda of U.S. President Donald Trump and populist governments in Italy, Hungary, Austria and elsewhere as well as Britain’s impending divorce from the European Union.
Addressing the Mandela event, Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani never mentioned the United States — which has accused Tehran of promoting international terrorism, a charge it vehemently denies.
But Rouhani appeared to be taking aim at Trump and his pledge to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border when he said Mandela was a model for the “historical reality that great statesmen tend to build bridges instead of walls.”
Alluding to the Trump administration, Cuba’s President Miguel Diaz-Canel Bermudez said recent announcements about military expenditures are “alarming” and are pushing the world into a new arms race “to the detriment of the enormous resources that are needed to build a world of peace.”
South Africa’s Ramaphosa said his country’s “deepest hope” is that the summit, “in the name of one of our greatest exemplars of humanity, serves as a new dawn for the United Nations.”
“We hope we will rediscover the strength of will to save successive generations from war, and to overcome the hatred of our past and the narrow interests that blind us to the vision of a common future that is peaceful and prosperous,” he said. “We hope we will prove ourselves worthy as the bearers of the legacy of Nelson Mandela.”
