(Deroy Murdock, Headline USA) In his latest bid to unite America, President Joe Biden has called Georgia’s new election-integrity law “Jim Crow for the 21st Century” and “Jim Crow on steroids.”
“Parts of our country are backsliding,” Biden moaned Wednesday. “The days of Jim Crow, passing laws that hearken back to the era of poll taxes, when black people were made to guess how many beans—how many jelly beans in a jar—or count the number of bubbles in a bar of soap before they could cast their ballot.”
Biden said this via satellite to the National Action Network. Its founder, Al Sharpton, is a museum-quality racial arsonist who has called Jews “diamond merchants.”
Sharpton’s anti-Semitic slurs may even be to blame for a 1995 massacre. He referred to Harlem store owner Fred Harari, who is Jewish, as a “white interloper.” That may have inspired Roland Smith, a crazed protester, to shoot up and ignite Freddie’s Fashion Mart. The ensuing inferno killed seven. Smith fatally shot himself.
Rather than bring Americans together, Biden’s inflammatory rhetoric pits citizens against each other. His needlessly incendiary language is like complaining that a supermarket that lacks kosher food hearkens back to Kristallnacht.
While Biden bashes the Peach State’s new statute, why didn’t he help loosen Delaware’s much tighter vote rules?
- Days of in-person early voting? Georgia: 17. Delaware: Zero
- Ballot drop boxes? Georgia: at least 159 (no fewer than one per county). Delaware: Zero
- No-excuse absentee ballots? Georgia: Yes. Delaware: No.
- Voter ID required? Georgia: Yes. Delaware: Yes.
Biden also trivializes the pain of Jim Crow’s genuine victims while diluting the cruelty of these mandates and their 76-year-long, “separate-but-equal” reign of terror.
“This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle,” Biden told journalists at his March 25 press conference. “I mean, this is gigantic what they’re trying to do, and it cannot be sustained.”
Male bald eagles typically weigh 10 times as much as an average one-pound crow. Does Biden truly believe that Georgia’s “Jim Eagle” law is 10 times worse than Jim Crow’s multifaceted, anti-black voter suppression?
Poll taxes once made voting too expensive for poor citizens, many black. Georgia’s new law imposed no poll tax.
Before 1965, Alabama’s literacy test asked prospective voters 68 questions, including: “If a state is a party to a case, the Constitution provides that original jurisdiction shall be in ________.”
By refusing to hear Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s anti-vote-fraud case last December and citing a lack of standing as its justification, today’s Supreme Court forgot that it should be the correct answer.
Also, “The Constitution limits the size of the District of Columbia to ________.”
Answer: 10 square miles.
Despite the urgent, nationwide need for improved civics education, today’s Georgia kept literacy tests buried.
Michigan’s Jim Crow Museum observes that in many a lynching, “The victim was an example of what happened to a black man who tried to vote.”
Yet, Georgia did not reinstate lynching.
Northern Freedom Riders headed South to register black voters in 1961. They endured beatings and fire-bombings.
Georgia has resurrected neither.
Three young Congress of Racial Equality activists named James Chaney (a black man), Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner (both white) registered black Mississippians in June 1964.
On Goodman’s first evening on duty, local Klansmen murdered them and hid their bodies in an earthen dam.
Elsewhere, investigators found the bodies of black Freedom Summer college students Henry Dee and Charles Moore, a cadaver in a CORE T-shirt, and five other corpses.
That was Jim Crow, not merely requiring voters—black and otherwise—to show ID, as do 36 states (including Biden’s blessed Delaware). Blacks routinely present ID at airports, banks, libraries, hotels and millions of other venues daily.
For Biden to compare Georgia’s vote-expansion bill with the Jim Crow that slaughtered Chaney, Goodman, Schwerner, Dee and Moore is morally grotesque, über-divisive, and a profound insult to those who were killed while crushing Jim Crow and securing black voting rights.
And, remember: The Jim Crow laws were passed, signed and brutally enforced by Democrats, not Republicans.
Perhaps that’s why Biden cannot shut up about Jim Crow. Those racist rules were his party’s handiwork.
Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News Contributor, a contributing editor with National Review Online, and a senior fellow with the London Center for Policy Research. Bucknell University’s Michael Malarkey contributed research to this opinion piece.
