Black Americans voted at historic levels last year. But millions more couldn’t.

By Lee A. Daniels

Will they or won’t they?

That question about the black vote—about whether black voters would show up at the polls on election day—hung over the bitter final months of last year’s presidential campaign like a looming thunder cloud.

The answer was resounding, of course, and now, thanks to recent reports by the Census Bureau and the Pew Hispanic Center, we have a wealth of data to quantify just how historic for black America and America November 4, 2008 was.

Voting participation of black voters aged 18 to 24 soared from 47.1 percent in 2004 to 55.4 percent last year; that of black voters aged 25 to 44 increased from 59.3 percent in 2004 to 64 percent last year. Overall, nearly 65 percent of blacks who were eligible to vote did so last year (compared to 66 percent of whites). In 2004, about 60 percent of blacks voted.

Voting participation in both categories by Hispanic Americans and Asian Americans also increased.

In hard numbers that means that two million more blacks, two million more Hispanic Americans and 600,000 more Asian Americans voted last year than four years earlier.

In contrast, voting participation by whites in those two categories declined slightly in percentage terms, to 49.4 percent and 62.1 percent, respectively.

These and a raft of other statistics bear witness to blacks’ persistent and sophisticated playing of the game of politics over the past four decades. since Congressional passage of the Voting Rights Act unleashed black voting power throughout the country. They remind us that African Americans have answered in the affirmative one particular implicit demand Martin Luther King, Jr. set forth in his “I Have A Dream” speech.

“We can never be satisfied,” King declared that sweltering August day at the Lincoln Memorial forty-five years ago, “as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.”

In other words, King was urging blacks in the North as well as the South, to see, no matter what their current circumstances, that they did have something to vote for. He was demanding they envision – and make – their own political destiny.

The surge in black Americans’ voting, and the surveys showing a concomitant surge in black Americans’ overt expressions of patriotism are just part of a voluminous cache of evidence proving that Black America did set to work, amid the jeers of conservatives and many right-leaning centrists, forging its own political fortunes.

And yet, there is a shadow across all this data charting black Americans’ political progress. That shadow is part of the force that’s been a constant characteristic of African Americans’ journey from slavery to freedom: the complexity of black progress.

One way to describe the complexity of black progress is that it comprises the tension between advancement and stagnation that has always accompanied gains blacks have charted at any particular moment. Or, even worse, that progress is some areas is more than matched by a worsening of conditions for blacks in other endeavors—for example, the current juxtaposition of a black American as president while unemployment rates for African Americans are rocketing toward catastrophic levels.

Of course, it is a truism that the victories of great social movements like the twentieth-century civil rights movement usually produce unforeseen consequences that retard or undermine the force of some of the gains won. But that battle of opposing forces has been particularly evident in Black America’s efforts to capitalize on the expanded opportunities created by the post-1964 civil rights laws and policies. The result is that even as black Americans have rightly celebrated the achievements of individual blacks and the rise of a substantial cohort of  blacks to middle-class and upper-middle-class status, they must wrestle with numerous problems that underscore how far blacks remain from grasping the full measure of their American citizenship.

I spied one of those reminders last week in the form of a letter Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, the Washington, D.C.-based prison reform group, had sent to the New York Times.

Mauer had written in response to an earlier Times article reporting the celebratory news of the surge in black voting. He pointed out that the “encouraging news … actually understates the significance of the change.” Why? Because felony disfranchisement laws, which bar those with a current or previous felony convictions from voting disproportionately affect blacks and Latinos, as many organizations, including The Sentencing Project and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, have discussed in numerous reports.

“With felony disenfranchisement laws in 48 states,” Mauer wrote, “an estimated five million Americans are ineligible to vote … depending on their residence.” The huge racial disparity in who goes to prison in the U.S. translates, Mauer goes on, “into disparities in disenfranchisement as well, so that the African-American rate of disenfranchisement is more than triple the national rate. This results in a proportionally lower rate of eligible black voters than whites or other racial groups.”

In other words, there are perhaps two to three millions of black Americans, ex-offenders who have paid that debt to society for their wrongdoing, who now by law are prevented from having the opportunity to contribute to the good of the society. As Mauer and many others have said over the years, that is unjust.

One of the lessons the 2008 vote has underscored – again – is what the civil rights movement proved and what Martin Luther King, Jr. told America forty-five years ago: When people believe they have something to vote for, they are capable of the greatest civic good.

Lee A. Daniels is Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline and Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal and Educational Defense Fund, Inc.