E. Urban Legends: What Color Is Your Kool-Aid?

Don’t Believe the Hype!

Ku Klux Klan Endorses Obama

By David Emery, About.com Netlore Archive: Emailed ‘news item’ dated Feb. 7, 2008 claims the Imperial Wizard of the KKK (Ku Klux Klan) has endorsed Barack Obama for the presidency Description: Web satire
Circulating since: Feb. 2008
Status: False
Email example contributed by an AOL user, Feb. 13, 2008: Subject: Klu Klux Klan Endorses Obama Klu Klux Klan Endorses Obama
by James R. Crowe Anything or anyone is better than Hillary Rodham Clinton KENTUCKY – USA – Imperial Wizard, Ronald Edwards has stated that, “anything is better than Hillary Clinton.” White Christian Supremacist group the Klu Klux Klan has endorsed Barack Obama to be the next President of the United States of America. Speaking from his Kentucky office in Dawson Springs, the Imperial Wizard exclaimed that anything or anyone is better than having that “crazy a– b–ch” as President.
(Read Full Text)

Comments: False, of course; and clearly intended as a joke. This satirical piece was originally published on The Daily Squib, a UK website which displays the following disclaimer at the bottom of every page: The Daily Squib is a satirical publication and should therefore not be taken too fu**ing seriously. In a similar article published on January 29, 2008, TheSpoof.com declared current Republican president George W. Bush a fervent supporter of Obama. That is also false.

On the other hand, if you hear rumors to the effect that hippy-dippy ice cream makers Ben & Jerry have endorsed Obama, believe them.

This Just In (as of 2/4/08):

Dear friends:

This email is a head’s up in that we are expecting Anti Affirmative Action petition signature gatherers to be out in force at the polls tomorrow. They often use a very deceptive message such as your signature will help “ban discrimination.” Be aware of what petition you are signing. There is only one on this issue and it is to ban affirmative action in Missouri. Support the FOCUS position by not signing the petition. See the press release we prepared below for more details.

If you see the signature gatherers at your polling place tomorrow, or out on the streets at any time, give the hotline a call at 1-877-644-0466.

Also, I hope you are planning to attend the public hearing on affirmative action which we are planning on February 13 at 6:30 p.m. at Harris Stowe’s auditorium.

Let me know if you have questions.

Thanks
Reggie Williams

Policy/ Bridges Director
314-6221250 ext: 105

Deceptive Effort to Collect Petition Signatures Happening Across Missouri

Think Before You Ink, You Could be Helping to Ban Affirmative Action Without Knowing It

ST. LOUIS, January 30, 2008—There is a deceptive effort underway to collect signatures as part of a ballot initiative to change the Missouri constitution. Those collecting signatures are telling people that signing will help “end discrimination” or “ban inequality in government programs.” Yet, the petition will actually be used to end affirmative action programs which work to eliminate discrimination against, and improve opportunities for, women and minorities.

The concern of the WE CAN Coalition is that people would not support this effort to end affirmative action programs in Missouri if they were fully informed about what they were signing. There is special concern that signature gatherers will be out in full force with their deceptive message as voters go to the polls on Tuesday, February 5.

“Citizens need to know that they do not have to sign on the spot, we suggest that all voters get more information before deciding whether or not to sign the petition. Read about it and think about it, changing the state constitution is a serious decision,” said Brandon Davis, organizer of the WE CAN Coalition. The coalition, led by Senator Rita Days, the Service Employees International Union, and 27 other organizations including FOCUS St. Louis, Jobs with Justice, and the American Civil Liberties Union, is committed to exposing and stopping the effort to end affirmative action in Missouri.

Affirmative action programs have lifted barriers faced by women, African Americans, Latinos, other ethnic minorities, and the special needs population, giving them equal access to higher education, jobs, and public contracts. Yet race, ethnicity, and gender continue to be a factor as shown through the wage gap, educational attainment gaps, and the proportionally low number of women-owned and minority-owned businesses. Affirmative action policies have helped close these gaps, but need to be continued for equity to be reached and maintained.

“If Missourians want to keep affirmative action alive, they should not sign the petition,” Davis adds. Gathering signatures on a petition is one of the first stages of the state ballot initiative process, which is designed to show that there is enough support for a proposal to put it to a vote in the general election. The effort to end affirmative action in Missouri is led by Ward Connerly, a California businessman working in five states this year to change constitutions to ban affirmative action policies. He has started an organization in Missouri with a title as deceptive as its tactics, “The Missouri Civil Rights Initiative.”

When Connerly’s efforts succeeded in California, the resulting ban on affirmative action was followed by a 25 percent drop in the appointment of minorities to tenure-track positions, and the number of women faculty decreased 22 percent throughout the University of California system. Also, UC-Berkeley admitted 61 percent fewer minorities in 1998, the year California first implemented the ban at the undergraduate level. Eight hundred black and other minority students with GPAs of 4.0 and SAT scores of at least 1200 were denied admission to the class of 1998. Similar bans have consistently resulted in declines in other states.

For more information on the work of the WE CAN Coalition, contact Brandon Davis at 314-367-0013 or bdavis@seiumo.org.

Will Black Voting Rights Expire in 2007?

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Netlore Archive: False email rumor claims that the right of African Americans to vote is set to expire in 2007 along with the Voting Rights Act of 1965

Another Internet hoax made headlines recently as the media got wind of the reaction among black Americans to a widely-forwarded email message claiming that their voting rights will vanish in the year 2007. Similar rumors have circulated since the mid-1990s.The message currently raising concerns reads as follows:

PLEASE PASS THIS ON TO AS MANY PEOPLE AS YOU CAN!!!! We are quickly approaching the 21st Century and I was wondering if anyone out there knew what the significance of the year 2007 is to Black America? Did you know that our right to vote will expire in the year 2007? Seriously! The Voters Rights Act signed in 1965 by Lyndon B. Johnson was just an ACT.It was not made a law. In 1982 Ronald Reagan amended the Voters Rights Act for only another 25 years. Which means that in the year 2007 we could lose the right to vote!Does anyone realize that Blacks/African Americans are the only group of people who still require PERMISSION under the United States Constitution to vote?!In the year 2007 Congress will once again convene to decide whether or not Blacks should retain the right to vote (crazy, but true). In order for this to be passed, 38 states will have to approve an extension. In my opinion and many others, this is ludicrous! Not only should the extension be approved, but ... this Act must be made a law. Our right to vote should no longer be up for discussion, review and/or evaluation. We must contact our Congress persons, Senators, Alderpersons, etc., to put a stop to this! As bona fide citizens of the United States, we cannot "drop the ball" on this one! We have come too far to let government make us take such a huge step backward. So please, let us push forward to continue to build the momentum towards gaining equality. Please pass this onto others, as I am sure that many more individuals are not aware of this. [ READ FULL TEXT ]

NOTE: A latter-day version of this message attributes authorship to Camille Cosby, wife of comedian Bill Cosby. She did not write it.

The kernel of truth in the text is that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is indeed set to expire unless it is renewed by Congress before 2007. The rest of it is false. The basic right of all American citizens to vote, regardless of race, is guaranteed in the Bill of Rights and can’t expire with the Voting Rights Act.

The NAACP addressed this issue in a statement quoted in the November 19, 1998 issue of the Internet Tourbus:

African American voting rights were granted by the Fifteenth Amendment, which was passed immediately after the Civil War. Expiration of the Voting Rights Act will not terminate the rights granted under the Fifteenth Amendment.

The U.S. Department of Justice concurs. In its “Voting Rights Act Clarification” dated April 2, 1998, it states:

The basic prohibition against discrimination in voting contained in the Fifteenth amendment and in the Voting Rights Act does not expire in 2007 — it does not expire at all; it is permanent.

The confusion arises from the apparent assumption that it’s the Voting Rights Act alone which guarantees suffrage to minorities. In reality, all the Act does is keep in place a set of so-called “extraordinary remedies” meant to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment at state and local levels, where, in defiance of federal law, obstacles to the voting rights of black people were still in place in some parts of the country as of the early 1960s. These remedies, designed specifically to address problems that existed at the time, were never meant to be permanent, which is why the Voting Rights Act comes up for renewal every 25 years.

It’s difficult to determine exactly where and when the rumor that African Americans’ voting rights will expire in 2007 got started, though Internet discussions of the topic in 1997 made reference to the issue being raised on Tom Joyner’s radio talk show. One Usenet posting dated January 21, 1997 is clearly a precursor of the text now circulating.

“I’d say we have gotten hundreds of calls on this over the past two years,” South Carolina Representative James Clyburn of told reporters this week. “It’s frustrating dealing with this hoax.”

And I thought I was the only one who had days like that.

United States Department of Justice
Civil Rights Division
Voting Section

Introduction To Federal Voting Rights Laws

• Introduction To Federal Voting Rights Laws
• Before the Voting Rights Act
• The Voting Rights Act of 1965
• The Effect of the Voting Rights Act

The Voting Rights Act of 1965

The 1965 Enactment

By 1965 concerted efforts to break the grip of state disfranchisement had been under way for some time, but had achieved only modest success overall and in some areas had proved almost entirely ineffectual. The murder of voting-rights activists in Philadelphia, Mississippi, gained national attention, along with numerous other acts of violence and terrorism. Finally, the unprovoked attack on March 7, 1965, by state troopers on peaceful marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, en route to the state capitol in Montgomery, persuaded the President and Congress to overcome Southern legislators’ resistance to effective voting rights legislation. President Johnson issued a call for a strong voting rights law and hearings began soon thereafter on the bill that would become the Voting Rights Act.

Congress determined that the existing federal anti-discrimination laws were not sufficient to overcome the resistance by state officials to enforcement of the 15th Amendment. The legislative hearings showed that the Department of Justice’s efforts to eliminate discriminatory election practices by litigation on a case-by-case basis had been unsuccessful in opening up the registration process; as soon as one discriminatory practice or procedure was proven to be unconstitutional and enjoined, a new one would be substituted in its place and litigation would have to commence anew.

President Johnson signed the resulting legislation into law on August 6, 1965. Section 2 of the Act, which closely followed the language of the 15th amendment, applied a nationwide prohibition against the denial or abridgment of the right to vote on the literacy tests on a nationwide basis. Among its other provisions, the Act contained special enforcement provisions targeted at those areas of the country where Congress believed the potential for discrimination to be the greatest. Under Section 5, jurisdictions covered by these special provisions could not implement any change affecting voting until the Attorney General or the United States District Court for the District of Columbia determined that the change did not have a discriminatory purpose and would not have a discriminatory effect. In addition, the Attorney General could designate a county covered by these special provisions for the appointment of a federal examiner to review the qualifications of persons who wanted to register to vote. Further, in those counties where a federal examiner was serving, the Attorney General could request that federal observers monitor activities within the county’s polling place.

The Voting Rights Act had not included a provision prohibiting poll taxes, but had directed the Attorney General to challenge its use. In Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections, 383 U.S. 663 (1966), the Supreme Court held Virginia’s poll tax to be unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment. Between 1965 and 1969 the Supreme Court also issued several key decisions upholding the constitutionality of Section 5 and affirming the broad range of voting practices that required Section 5 review. As the Supreme Court put it in its 1966 decision upholding the constitutionality of the Act:

Congress had found that case-by-case litigation was inadequate to combat wide-spread and persistent discrimination in voting, because of the inordinate amount of time and energy required to overcome the obstructionist tactics invariably encountered in these lawsuits. After enduring nearly a century of systematic resistance to the Fifteenth Amendment, Congress might well decide to shift the advantage of time and inertia from the perpetrators of the evil to its victims.

South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U.S. 301, 327-28 (1966).

The 1970 and 1975 Amendments

Congress extended Section 5 for five years in 1970 and for seven years in 1975. With these extensions Congress validated the Supreme Court’s broad interpretation of the scope of Section 5. During the hearings on these extensions Congress heard extensive testimony concerning the ways in which voting electorates were manipulated through gerrymandering, annexations, adoption of at-large elections, and other structural changes to prevent newly-registered black voters from effectively using the ballot. Congress also heard extensive testimony about voting discrimination that had been suffered by Hispanic, Asian and Native American citizens, and the 1975 amendments added protections from voting discrimination for language minority citizens.

In 1973, the Supreme Court held certain legislative multi-member districts unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment on the ground that they systematically diluted the voting strength of minority citizens in Bexar County, Texas. This decision in White v. Regester, 412 U.S. 755 (1973), strongly shaped litigation through the 1970s against at-large systems and gerrymandered redistricting plans. In Mobile v. Bolden, 446 U.S. 55 (1980), however, the Supreme Court required that any constitutional claim of minority vote dilution must include proof of a racially discriminatory purpose, a requirement that was widely seen as making such claims far more difficult to prove.

The 1982 Amendments

Congress renewed in 1982 the special provisions of the Act, triggered by coverage under Section 4 for twenty-five years. Congress also adopted a new standard, which went into effect in 1985, providing how jurisdictions could terminate (or “bail out” from) coverage under the provisions of Section 4. Furthermore, after extensive hearings, Congress amended Section 2 to provide that a plaintiff could establish a violation of the Section without having to prove discriminatory purpose.