#23 The History of Voting Rights w/ Pippa Holloway
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 9 October 2016
⏱️ 42 minutes
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Summary
Restoring voting rights for Americans convicted of felonies has been a major issue in the last year, most recently in the state of Virginia. According to The Sentencing Project, almost 6 million Americans are prohibited from voting due to laws that take the right to vote away from those convicted of a felony.
To better understand the origins of felon disfranchisement laws, we invited Dr. Pippa Holloway of Middle Tennessee State University to join us for a discussion about her most recent book Living in Infamy: Felon Disfranchisement and the History of American Citizenship. Pippa explains the ways that these laws were developed as a strategy to prevent black Americans from voting in the post-Civil War-era. This strategy was later exported to other states such as Idaho and Hawaii for the purposes of excluding groups whose interests were in opposition to the ruling party. Pippa also discusses the current impediments to Americans' right to vote, and offers suggestions to ensure that Americans are not denied a voice in our political process. Recorded October 4, 2016 in Nashville, TN w/ Bob via video call from Memphis, TN.
For more on the podcast: www.theroadtonow.com
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Coming up on the road to now. Even though, like, if you look at the 19th century, poll taxes and |
| 0:07.0 | literacy tests affected, they did more of the work of disfranchisement. So more people in the late |
| 0:12.0 | 19th century lost the right to vote due to poll taxes or literacy tests. Phelan disfranchisement |
| 0:17.5 | was the first strategy. It was the first one out the gate in 1866 as a means |
| 0:21.9 | of targeting African-American voters. They definitely are. And they say things like, well, this is great. This is going to really, you know, erode the African-American electorate. This is going to put a stop to black voting. That's something that's very much like it's on the forefront of these discussions in the 1870s. |
| 0:36.2 | I'm Bob Crawford. |
| 0:37.3 | And I'm Ben Sawyer, |
| 0:38.4 | and this is the road to now. |
| 0:40.7 | Ben,yer, and this is the road to now. Ben, we had a great interview yesterday with a good friend of yours. That's right. We had Dr. Pippa Holloway on the podcast. I was really excited because, you know, I have a lot of great colleagues at MTSU and I think the |
| 0:54.8 | history department there is exceptional and there are a couple people that I |
| 0:57.5 | really want to have on the podcast and I you know I don't want to I don't want to |
| 1:00.5 | bring them all that you guys at one time you know we want to diversify what we're |
| 1:03.9 | doing but Pippa was my number one choice to have on because she is she is |
| 1:09.0 | an activist in her work and she is hum humane, and she is, she's a great |
| 1:14.5 | neighbor, she's a great citizen in our community, and her book that she just published a few years |
| 1:19.3 | ago, living in infamy, fell in disenfranchisement in the history of American citizenship, |
| 1:23.9 | which was published in 2013 by Oxford University Press. I read this book. I got to know Pippa and we rode to school a couple of times together. We both live in Nashville and work in Murphy'sboro, and she was telling me about it, and I was like, I've got to get this book, and I got it shortly after it came out and read it, and it stuck with me. It's one of these books that really gives you information that I think really if you read this and it stuck with me it's one of these books that really uh that gives you information |
| 1:45.1 | that i think really if you read this and you engage it correctly and you keep your mind open |
| 1:49.8 | it's going to change the way you view the the the present in terms of the way that we treat |
| 1:55.0 | prisoners and the way that we treat them after they have served their time and so i read the book |
| 1:59.9 | it was brilliant. |
| 2:06.1 | And so I was happy whenever Pippa agreed to be on our podcast. |
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