Last Day of the Western Isles, 61st of Spring, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): Last Day of the Western Isles and last day of Spring, which started 61 days ago with Day of the Western Isles. Last day of the Spring avatar, the Earth Mother, as well. Tomorrow is the start of Midsommar, and with it the return of the Sun Girl as our seasonal avatar.
By the time the Civil War had ended in 1865, formerly enslaved men and women in the defeated Confederate states were legally free in accordance with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation two years earlier. On December 6, 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment, the first of three “Reconstruction Amendments,” abolished slavery in the United States. Two years later, the Fourteenth Amendment granted full citizenship for all Americans. In 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment granted the right to vote to all American men regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
For a brief period of time, Reconstruction afforded the right to freely vote to formerly enslaved African-American men. Reconstruction fell apart following the highly contested 1877 election of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes after Democrats agreed to concede the election in exchange for the withdrawal of all federal troops from the former Confederacy. Exploitative systems of convict leasing and sharecropping soon followed and returned many Black people to a status very similar to slavery, and obstacles such as literacy tests and poll taxes were enacted by White officials to suppress the Black vote. But between 1970 and 1890, African-American men had been elected to public office in some Black-majority towns.
Florida’s Black Public Officials, 1867-1924, a book by Canter Brown, Jr. (1998, University of Alabama Press), notes that some neighborhoods in and around Jacksonville, Florida, such as LaVilla, proved to be fertile grounds for minority office holding. Brown counts a minimum of forty-six African Americans as serving in local governments from at least 1870 to the towns' consolidation with Jacksonville in 1887. This is significant to me, just as voting rights are personally significant to me, because my great-grandfather, Sylvanus Henry Hart, who was born on a plantation in South Carolina in 1860 and lived the first five years of his life in slavery, was elected as town clerk of LaVilla during the 1880s.
My great-grandfather was one of those few Black men elected to public office in the Reconstruction South in that window of time between federal enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment and the era of Jim Crow. It wasn't until passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that the Jim Crow era (but not racism) finally ended. The Voting Rights Act was the United States' attempt to restore the system of equal rights that had allowed by great-grandfather to once hold the office of Town Clerk in LaVilla, Florida.
So, yeah, I take the evisceration of the Voting Rights Act by the corrupt and illegitimate SCOTUS personally.
