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Text of talk by Michael Paul Williams, columnist, Richmond Times-Dispatch
Good afternoon, and thank you for having me as a guest of Richmond First Club.
I checked out your website and see that you referred to me as a fixture at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Even though it makes me feel older than I'd like, I embrace the description.
Fixtures are an increasingly rare commodity in journalism. Newspapers have undergone tremendous change. The T-D newsroom is less than half the size it used to be, and I've seen many colleagues move on, not always by choice. I think we need fixtures in journalism, if for no other reason than they represent stability, experience and institutional memory. I'm happy and proud to be a fixture.
I have written columns for the Times-Dispatch for 20 years, a fact I have a difficult time processing. As it turns out, I didn't find my voice as a journalist until I was given the opportunity to infuriate readers. You should prepare to be infuriated today, or at least a bit unnerved. If you aren't, I haven't done my job.
As a lifelong native of the Richmond area, I have a vested interest in the work you do as members of the Richmond First Club. I'm sure we share some of the same loves and same frustrations about our city. I love the river that runs through it and the rocks that dot the river. I love the livable neighborhoods, our living-history setting and the promise of our future.
I hate the easy access to guns, the crime and the killing, the fear that it breeds. I hate our indifference to people who lack cars and need mass transit to get around. I hate the concentrated poverty, our tendency to live in the past, and the unfulfilled promise of our future.
I hate that we feel the need to gaze elsewhere to glimpse our vision for Richmond. I hate our misguided pride and our low self-esteem. I love it when artists paint the town red, green and all sorts of hues. I love bicycles and wall murals and students dancing in the street after a big win. I love witnessing the transformation of our town from staid to artsy and funky. I want us to exorcise the ghosts of our past.
Part of my job as a columnist is to prod Richmond and our state - sometimes gently, other times, not so much - in a progressive direction.
As journalists, we are the safeguards of the temple of democracy. Voting is the key to that temple. Your overarching theme today is crime and punishment. I wish to talk about a punishment that is cruel and -- by the standards of the nations we liked to be judged against -- unusual. I'm talking about the extent in which Virginia denies people the right to vote - not merely today, but throughout much of its history.
We are playing politics with voting rights. The latest example is the so-called Voter ID laws around the country, including in Virginia.
Were Virginia elections being undermined by voting imposters? During the recent legislative session, no one could point to concrete examples of voter ID fraud. In the run-up to the November election, we were told that such laws were crucial. As if on cue, we recently learned of a state police investigation which resulted in 38 charges of voter fraud.
Never mind that these cases invariably involved felons who failed to disclose their status in registering to vote - a deception that wouldn't be prevented by voter ID laws. The charges were upheld as an example of the prevalence of voter fraud in Virginia.
But in their zeal to prevent voter fraud, legislators are ignoring the greatest threat to voter integrity in Virginia. I'm speaking of felon disenfranchisement.
An estimated 378,000 citizens in Virginia are barred from exercising their right to vote due to a felony conviction. The majority of these citizens have completed their sentences.
Our felon disenfranchisement law is more restrictive than 46 other states. Only an act of the governor can restore an individual's voting rights.
While most states restore voting rights upon the completion of a sentence, parole or supervised release, Virginia - along with Florida, Iowa and Kentucky - are the only states that permanently disenfranchise felons unless the state restores their rights.
Research indicates that those who vote after completing their sentences are half as likely to commit a crime as those who do not vote. Virginia law is counterproductive in rehabilitating felons, making it not only mean-spirited, but poor public policy.
Gov. Bob McDonnell has stepped up voter restoration and is on pace to easily exceed the 4,402 rights restored by predecessor Tim Kaine. But you don't have to be a mathematician to see that the rights that have been restored are a drop in the bucket. The process, though it has been streamlined, is still needlessly complicated and involves waiting periods.
Take the story of Kemba Smith Pradia, a young woman I came to know as a reporter and have come to consider a friend:
As a student at Hampton University, she began dating a drug dealer who played a large role in a major crack cocaine ring. Convicted of drug-related offenses at 22, she was sentenced in 1994 to 24 1/2 years in federal prison, despite no prior criminal record or evidence that she sold, handled or used drugs.
Kemba was granted clemency by President Bill Clinton in 2000. She earned her college degree and travels around the country to counsel young people to avoid her mistakes, even as she pushes for fairer drug laws. She has written a memoir. But it wasn't until last November that she cast her first ballot. .
After Clinton commuted her sentence, Kemba had to complete nearly five years of supervised release and an additional five-year waiting period before she could reapply for her voting rights in Virginia. Several years ago, she got married and moved to Indianapolis, where she discovered she could vote. But her husband's job as an air traffic controller is bringing the family back to Virginia. She must beat the clock if she is to have her rights restored by the November elections.
Kemba was part of a delegation that in March visited the United Nations in Geneva to speak to the United Nations Human Rights Council about felon disenfranchisement. The trip was inspired by a 1947 appeal to the U.N. by NAACP co-founder W.E.B. Du Bois, who made the trip to speak on the challenges of full voter participation in the United States. That such a trip was necessary 65 years later should be a source of shame.
Rather than waiting for the highly unlikely event of the General Assembly amending the Virginia Constitution, McDonnell, as governor, could do far more to restore voting rights. In 2007, then-Florida Governor Charlie Crist helped restore the voting rights of more than 115,000 felons. Unfortunately, his successor, Rick Scott, revoked the rule changes that allow those citizens to vote.
Scott's action was denounced by in a letter signed by, the ACLU, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Sentencing Project and a professor at New York University's Brenan Centerfor Justice, who said, "It is well-documented that Florida's criminal disenfranchisement laws are a relic of a discriminatory past."
"The voting ban was an attempt to weaken political power of African-Americans, and it continues to have the intended effect today," the letter said. It added that nearly a quarter of those who are disenfranchised in Florida are African-American.
If all of this sounds familiar, it should. In Virginia, one out of five African-Americans cannot vote due to felon disenfranchisement. One in four black men in Virginia is barred from voting.
And lest you think this is simply a coincidence, or an accident of history, think again. The systematic removal of black citizens from their franchise was the expressed intent when Virginia's felon disenfranchisement became part of the Virginia Constitution in the early 1900s. In Virginia, criminal disenfranchisement has been linked to poll taxes, literacy tests and other chicanery used in the past to discourage blacks, the poor and the undereducated from voting.
Or as then-Delegate Carter Glass said at the time:
"Discrimination! Why, that is precisely what we propose. That, exactly, is what this Convention was elected for-to discriminate to the very extremity of permissible action under the limitations of the Federal Constitution, with a view to the elimination of every negro voter who can be gotten rid of legally, without materially impairing the numerical strength of the white electorate."`
How can we in good conscience, as an enlightened and diverse state in the 21st century, continue to support a law whose motives were so clearly contrary to democracy itself?
Not unlike the civil rights movement of the middle of the last century, the disenfranchisement issue makes us look like hypocrites in the eyes of the world community. Marc Maier, executive director of the Sentencing Project, told me that the disenfranchisement of 5 million U.S. citizens is far out of line with the democracies of Canada and Western Europe, where people with felony convictions typically can vote upon their release, if not while incarcerated.
South Africa - whose racist apartheid policies made it the scourge of the world community little more than two decades ago - allows its inmates the right to vote. I repeat: South Africa! In our country, only Maine and Vermont allow inmates to vote.
Our history of voter disenfranchisement, and the racist history behind it, calls into question the very integrity of our criminal justice system itself. Is crime driving punishment, or is politics?
Legal scholar Michelle Alexander, in a provocative book, has labeled this phenomenon the New Jim Crow. She writes:
"Jarvious Cotton's great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Klu Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation; his father was barred by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole."
Cotton is from Louisiana, but he might well be from Virginia. Our commonwealth, in refusing to end a race-based assault on democracy, has forfeited the moral high ground in stripping the rites of citizenship from those who have paid their debt to society.
We are perpetuating a crime against our fellow citizens that not only stymies their productive return to society but insults the very ideal this country was founded upon.
We are playing politics with voting rights. The latest example is the so-called Voter ID laws around the country, including in Virginia.
Were Virginia elections being undermined by voting imposters? During the recent legislative session, no one could point to concrete examples of voter ID fraud. In the run-up to the November election, we were told that such laws were crucial. As if on cue, we recently learned of a state police investigation which resulted in 38 charges of voter fraud.
Never mind that these cases invariably involved felons who failed to disclose their status in registering to vote - a deception that wouldn't be prevented by voter ID laws. The charges were upheld as an example of the prevalence of voter fraud in Virginia.
In my job, every day, I see vivid evidence that we're better than this.
This legacy of disenfranchisement should be a source of shame.Virginia and Richmond retain a heart of darkness. Until our hearts are in the right place, one foot of Virginia will always be mired in an ugly past.
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