Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

by Stacey Abrams

However, the battle has long targeted the marginalized and the dispossessed, cordoning off the right to vote for a select group, from the beginning. In the first full year of our nation’s founding, the Naturalization Act of 1790 passed to prevent anyone except former slaves and “free white persons” from becoming citizens. This targeted the Native Americans who had occupied the nation long before the Mayflower reached American shores. Having dispatched with the potential of too many freed slaves by enshrining slavery into the founding documents, the U.S. Supreme Court cemented this position in Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), deciding that Blacks could not be considered American citizens and had no standing to challenge slavery. Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote, “A negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves” was permanently disenfranchised because a Black person inherently was “[not] a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution.” The notion of “political community” lay at the heart of this denunciation of Black participation in American democracy, creating a private club where the only accepted members had to look and act the part. At the country’s inception, the Founding Fathers decided who would be deemed worthy of citizenship; and they used, as a measuring stick, the ability to maintain the class and power structure that had laid the foundation for their wealth and political dominance. Not surprisin...