Black votes matter: Missouri Black leaders shaken by Confederate-clad Capitol riot
The first Black woman to represent the state of Missouri was in her fourth day in office when a mob of mostly white men stormed the U.S. Capitol, some waving the Confederate flag, in an effort to prevent Black votes from being counted.
For Rep. Cori Bush, a St. Louis Democrat, the flag and other symbols of white supremacy brandished by rioters Wednesday underscore that it was a deadly attempt to undo the “work that so many Black and brown people did to deliver this election to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.”
The rioters were driven by a desire to keep President Donald Trump in office despite the fact that he received 7 million fewer votes than President-elect Biden and soundly lost the Electoral College.
The violence — which left five dead, including a Capitol police officer— took place after weeks of baseless assertions by Trump and others that swing state cities with large minority populations, such as Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta and Milwaukee, were hotbeds of voter fraud.
The view that Black votes shouldn’t matter has a long and ugly history in this country, Bush noted. Jim Crow-era poll taxes and acts of violent intimidation are among the many ways that states have suppressed voters of color since the Civil War.
“Those people who showed up yesterday believed it was their duty. Here we are again that Black and brown voices don’t matter in this country… That’s what we saw yesterday: People whose mindset is that it’s OK for Black and brown people to not be seen as human,” Bush said Thursday.
The Star was originally scheduled to interview Bush about her legislative agenda and the challenges of taking office during a global pandemic. But after the attack, the conversation instead centered on the violence at the Capitol, a place she expected to feel safe as a lawmaker and citizen.
Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, Missouri’s senior Democrat and first Black mayor of Kansas City, said many white people would not fully understand the pain it caused African Americans as the Confederate flag, symbol of secessionists who fought to preserve the “enslavement of my ancestors,” was paraded through the seat of the federal government along with neo-Nazi paraphernalia and at least one noose.
“We didn’t bring race into it. They did. When you see the Confederate flag, that is race. When you see a noose—which is how our ancestors died— that is race. And when you attack certain sections of states, the geography, that’s race,” he said.
It was a lie about President Barack Obama’s birth certificate that propelled Trump to political relevance, Cleaver said. He stayed relevant with attacks on immigrants and in recent weeks sought to stay in power with his insistence that cities with high minority populations stole the election.
“You can always get people riled up in our country by using Black. And the Trumps are professionals. They would embarrass George Wallace with the ways they use race,” said Cleaver, invoking the segregationist who served multiple terms as Alabama’s governor and received nearly 10 million votes as a third-party presidential candidate in 1968.
The former pastor of St. James United Methodist Church, Cleaver was the target of repeated attacks from the president’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., earlier in the week after using the pun “a-woman” at the end of his opening prayer for the congressional session. Cleaver said his church temporarily shut down its phone lines after receiving threatening phone calls.
Even though there are just days left in Trump’s presidency, Cleaver said Congress has a responsibility to remove him from office.
“If it comes to the floor, I’ll push my card down as hard as I can push it,” Cleaver said about a potential second impeachment. Trump escaped removal from office last year after acquittal by the GOP-controlled Senate.
Cleaver, who has long championed the cause of civility on Capitol Hill, said he was spiritually struggling with the prospect of working with his colleagues who voted to throw out Arizona and Pennsylvania’s electoral votes. These lawmakers make up a minority in the House, but they represent a majority of the House Republican caucus.
Bush has called for the expulsion of every lawmaker who challenged Biden’s electoral votes. That would require the removal of 10 lawmakers from Missouri and Kansas, including Sens. Josh Hawley and Roger Marshall.
The region’s Democrats—Bush, Cleaver and Kansas Rep. Sharice Davids, one of first Native American women to serve in Congress—all vocally opposed the efforts to overturn the election. All three represent districts that are more diverse than the rest of Missouri and Kansas.
The eight House members from the two states who supported the objections are all white and represent districts more rural and far less racially diverse than those of their Democratic colleagues from the Kansas City metro and St. Louis.
Freshman Kansas Republican Rep. Tracey Mann promoted birther conspiracy theories about Obama during an unsuccessful congressional run in 2010.
He won election in Kansas’ most Republican-leaning district, “The Big First,” after ads targeting his primary opponent for supporting the resettlement of Somali refugees in western Kansas.
Mann’s spokeswoman declined to comment on his past birtherism or the calls for expulsion. The Kansas Democratic Party has called for the expulsion of each of the state’s lawmakers who supported the election objections and a federal investigation into their involvement.
The Kansas Republican Party said on a Twitter an investigation would be “baseless,” a term it has never used for voter fraud conspiracy theories, and called on Kansas Democrats to “retract this garbage.”
Kansas and Missouri were not competitive in the presidential race, but Trump fared poorly in the Kansas City metro and St. Louis, just as he did in other urban centers throughout the country.
His attacks on cities as crime-ridden and corrupt culminated in his baseless claims that voter fraud in swing state cities cost him the election.
Biden won Pennsylvania by improving on Hillary Clinton’s percentages in the state’s suburbs and rural areas. But Trump and his allies centered post-election attacks on Philadelphia, a Democratic-leaning city with a Black plurality, even though Trump’s margins there improved from 2016 to 2020.
Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas said Trump’s attempt to disenfranchise Black and brown voters would do long-term damage to outreach geared at increasing participation in communities of color.
“We go out and knock on doors and tell people — many of whom do not vote because they don’t believe their votes will make a difference — that you have power, that you have authority, that you have a voice,” Lucas said.
“To have watched television, to have read the papers the last five months and to see a president of the United States who’s saying the exact opposite — who’s saying that you’re corrupt, saying your voices are corrupt, your community is, to say that nothing can be trusted, to have a senator who’s saying such things — that has done an unimaginable amount of damage to our democracy and to faith in the system,” Lucas said in reference to Hawley’s lead role in promoting Trump’s efforts.
Lucas and Hawley have collaborated on issues related to urban housing, but Lucas said Hawley had chosen to stoke division rather than continue to focus on these issues to help improve the lives of Missourians.
“He was helping lead a movement that was looking to disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans, and particularly millions of Americans that were in swing states, that were in cities in swing states, that are in cities that have large Black and brown populations,” Lucas said.
Hawley has received widespread condemnation and growing calls for either censure or expulsion following the riot. Cleaver stopped just short of explicitly calling for his resignation, saying the senator needs to reflect on whether he can continue to serve the state of Missouri.
Missouri’s newest congresswoman has gone further and demanded Hawley’s expulsion. Bush has been particularly emphatic in tying her criticism of Hawley to his broader record on racial issues.
She pointed to his 2018 decision as Missouri attorney general not to bring charges against Mississippi County Jail officials when Tory Sanders, a 28-year-old Black prisoner, died in his cell after two officials allegedly pressed on his neck for more than three minutes.
Hawley’s office determined that Sanders died of “excited delirium,” a finding the Missouri NAACP has asked Hawley’s successor, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, to review and reconsider.
“When Josh Hawley was Missouri AG, he refused to charge the jail guards who murdered Tory Sanders, a Black man, by kneeling on his neck,” Bush said on Twitter. “@HawleyMO didn’t just get blood on his hands now—it’s been there. White supremacy allowed him to go on without consequence.”
Hawley did not respond to a question about Bush’s criticism.
Rev. Vernon Howard, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Kansas City, said Hawley should resign.
And he said Hawley should be ashamed that he raised his fist to the pro-Trump crowd ahead of the riot. A photo of the moment went viral on Wednesday.
“The fist raised in the air is an African American expression of solidarity with justice and peace and the beloved community,” Howard said. “It is not an expression of solidarity with violent hate and overthrow of the U.S. government. Shame on him. Shame on him.”
Howard said the attempted takeover of the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday was “shocking, but predictable” after Trump cultivated seeds of hate.
“It proves that those who are in favor of voter suppression are willing to actually lie, they’re willing to slander, they’re willing to make false claims in order to suppress the power, the influence of the Black, the brown vote in America.”
The attempt to overturn Biden’s victory was an affront to Black voters, said Michele Watley, founder of Shirley’s Kitchen Cabinet, a Kansas City-based group that mobilizes Black women and is named for the first Black woman in Congress.
“It’s obvious that there’s an effort to disenfranchise and take away the voice of Black voters for some gain for a party that simply just didn’t do the work to get voters to support their issues and their platforms,” Watley said.
“The American people have spoken. Black voters have spoken, and legislators need to respect what voters want.”
This story was originally published January 10, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
