I Am Empowered - I am the National Urban League

NJ.Com: GOP goal is suppressing the black vote

The state by state campaigns to pass voter ID laws is fast becoming a national shame. Doubly so, since it's an effort championed by the Republican Party, which fashions itself as the party of Lincoln, the party that went to war to rid the country of slavery.

But here we are, 147 years after the Civil War and 47 after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, locked in a battle harkening back to the days of poll taxes and literacy tests.  The current voter ID laws, as they are being promulgated, will largely impact African-Americans, seniors and students who don't have the identification required by these new laws.

It was the party of Lincoln that after the Civil War amended the Constitution to guarantee full rights of citizenship to newly freed slaves, including voting rights. Eventually federal troops stationed in former Confederate states were withdrawn, paving the way for the vanquished Confederate whites to impose Jim Crow laws on their former slaves, effectively re-establishing a dominance over them that, much to the shame of the nation, lasted in one form or another for nearly another 100 years.

Click Here to read more.