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A Dream Undone Analysis

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Voting has been a major barrier for African Americans before and since 1870 when African Americans males were given the right to vote due to a ratification in the 15th Amendment. In the article “A Dream Undone” by the New York Times, the reader is given a brief history of the black vote. Most of this is told in brief anecdotes from and or about numerous figures that reside in North Carolina. The stories focus on the tactics used to suppress the black vote, the role of race in politics, how race changed politics, and the progression of the black vote. The writers’ major argument of this article is that even though the Voting Rights Act has been in effect for fifty years, mainly Republican legislators have used tactics to undermine and cut out …show more content…

He starts off the article by making reference to Henry Frye, the first black chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court and continues down in history and continues to talk about important people in North Carolina and the United States that supported the minority vote or helped hinder the minority vote through various tactics, such as Carter Wrenn and Eric Holder Jr. Wrenn was a former strategist for Senator Jesse Helms and helped the Republican Party gain a majority in the South, largely by drawing conservative white voters from the Democratic Party with race-tinged campaigns. Holder is the first African American attorney general of the United States, he helped turn the Justice Departments focus from election fraud to improving access to the ballot. I believe that the writer mainly focused on North Carolina because of House Bill 589, a bill that was passed that some believe was purposefully written to have a discriminatory effect against black voters. It was originally a short voter ID bill, allowing for a wider range of IDs to be used, it then turned into a bill that suppressed voting. The writer even proves his point further by including that the New York School of Law stated that North Carolina had one of the most restrictive voting laws since the Jim Crow

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