Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy

by David Zucchino

procedures. But in 2013, the United States Supreme Court, in Shelby County v. Holder, gutted the law and eliminated the preclearance requirement. Within hours of the Shelby decision, a Republican leader of the voter ID effort told reporters: “Now we can go with the full bill” for voter ID—because the “legal headache” of preclearance had been removed. The state’s conservatives were now free to invoke the spirit of 1898 via a twenty-first-century voter suppression law nearly as effective as the suffrage amendment and grandfather clause 115 years earlier. The so-called voter ID bill was passed into law in late 2013. It reduced early voting and Sunday “souls to the polls” voting, both used disproportionately by African Americans. It eliminated same-day registration and straight-ticket voting, two other provisions especially popular among African Americans. The new law also required a state-issued ID to vote. That requirement imposed a special burden on African Americans voters, many of whom lacked a driver’s license, birth certificate, or other official documents required to obtain a state-issued ID.