Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) both appeared on a politics panel at the annual convention of Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network Wednesday where they discussed an on-going assault on voting rights that could affect the African- American community in the upcoming midterm elections. Controversies over voting rights and voter suppression weren’t absent from the 2012 campaign narrative. But the dialogue coming from the mainstream media, which is dominated by white voices on both sides of the question, was inevitably different from what was on display at the NAN panel. Jeffries and Rangel both had extremely harsh words for Republicans who they described as hell bent on disenfranchising black voters — rhetoric that mixed anger with hope that Republican opponents are on the losing side of history in a rapidly changing America.“We’re confronting the most significant and violent assault on voting rights since the advent of the 1965 Voting Rights Act,” Jeffries began. “It’s taken different forms. That legislation was designed to deal with poll taxes, and the grandfather clauses, and the literacy tests, and now we have voter ID laws and a contraction or an end to early voting. But it’s designed to accomplish the same objective–suppress the right to vote, particularly in communities of color.”
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=90485