Democracy Academy: The Most Devastating Case You’ve Never Heard Of
How the Supreme Court Crushed All Hope of Democracy in the South
Imagine coming of age able to vote.
Then voting actively for years. Seeing neighbors, friends and family all around you voting as well. And over that time, imagine seeing that your collective votes elected officials of your choosing.
Then imagine all of that disappearing almost overnight. Imagine being systematically removed from democracy. And almost everyone you know removed as well—as voters, and as elected officials.
And never returning for the rest of your lives.
That tragedy is the story of Black Southern men in the late 1800s (women couldn’t vote yet). A democracy they actively participated in in the early years of their lives would be destroyed as they aged, never to reemerge for the remainder of their lives, and locking in a brutal system of white supremacy all that time.
What happened to that generation is one of the great tragedies in American history.
One man in particular, living that nightmare, went to court to try and reverse it all.
His name was Jackson Giles, and he endured the hell of watching democracy eviscerated all around him. But to his great credit, Jackson Giles stood strong against the avalanche of suppression across Southern states in the late 19th and earlier 20th centuries. For decades, he mounted a herculean effort, rallying many others along the way.
Jackson Giles ultimately brought his fight to the highest court in the land, taking direct aim at an onslaught of suppression tools targeting him and his fellow Black Alabamans. And when he got to the U.S. Supreme Court, he demanded that the Constitutional Amendments enacted in his youth—guaranteeing that his “right” to “vote shall not be denied or abridged by….any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude”—finally be enforced. And he demanded to be reenlisted in the democracy in which he’d participated all of his adult life.
Jackson Giles went all in.
And lost.
It was a Supreme Court decision that cemented into place that tragedy for generations. That for a time, at least, erased all hope.
In a cruel but fitting irony, the defeat was delivered by a man considered one of the great legal minds in the history of American law. That such a towering and celebrated intellect was used to twist Giles’ compelling argument for justice into that devastating defeat tells us everything about how American law has operated for too much of the nation’s history.
And the fact that, as Richard Pildes writes, Giles’s case is “probably the most momentous ignored decision in the history of the Supreme Court,” tells us so much about how American history works.
This session of my Democracy Academy focuses on Jackson Giles, the overwhelming suppression of Black voters like him in Alabama and across the South at the turn of the 20th century, and his heroic attempt to reverse it. We will walk through the warped reasoning that led to the devastating outcome—as frustrating as any opinion you’ll ever read.
And as bad as it was, we’ll walk through how recent Court decisions still echo the ways in which the Court swept away Giles’ arguments for voting rights more than a century ago.
