The true consequence of the state takeover of local government

ohOn September 20, the Georgia State Board of Elections approved a rule requiring counties manually count all votes cast in the November elections. The new rule, approved by 3-2 pro-Trump majority of the Board, is the last in a series of rules that have caused widespread concern among election officials and democracy advocates ahead of the 2024 presidential election.. Fulton County, the most populous county in the state and the one with the largest black population in Georgia, has been specifically targeted by the State Board, which has been accused of seeking usurp the power of county authorities to govern their elections. the state board voted selecting people to be part of the county’s election monitoring team, inspiring the county to sue the board.

While the Georgia State Board of Elections seeks to gain control of Fulton County’s election process, it is not alone in its efforts more broadly. Republican-led state governments are increasingly taking over local governments, including local election boards, in Democratic-majority cities and counties.

In the American federalist system, where the power to govern elections, school districts, police, and most judicial systems resides at the local level, the overthrow of local governments by hostile state actors is deeply undemocratic. Black-majority communities have been experiencing these overthrows of their local governments since the post-Civil War period, and the most recent wave of these undemocratic overthrows could affect the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.

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After the Civil War, the southern states that were part of the Confederacy had to write constitutions that granted suffrage to black men in order to rejoin the Union. The presence of federal troops in the South to impose Reconstruction allowed the expansion of democratic rights for African Americans. During Reconstruction, black politicians were elected to thousands of seats across the South. Although several were elected to the United States Congress, the overwhelming majority were elected to state and local offices.

In response to the growth of black political power in localities throughout the South, the Ku Klux Klan, in collaboration with the Southern Democrats (the party identified at the time as the “white man’s party”—terror campaigns organized to intimidate black voters. Terror campaigns began after the end of the Civil War and accelerated when federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877. This resulted in the massacre of blacks in cities and towns where black votes had led to the rise of black elected officials and to republican control. of state and local governments. Violent mobs overthrew black and Republican political power in cities across the South, including in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898.

By the early 20th century, violent massacres were no longer necessary to overthrow local black governments in the South. When the federal government withdrew, southern states rewrote their constitutions to include mechanisms for state oversight of local government functions, such as the appointment of officials to school boards and county boards of elections.

Most importantly, the new state constitutions implemented “Dillon’s Rule” (a doctrine from the 1870s named after an Iowa state judge named John Forrest Dillon) which stated that local governments only have the powers explicitly granted by their state governments. The power to suppress black political power had shifted from the Klan to the courts, as states developed legal powers to control local governments. During the Jim Crow era, state constitutions denied self-government for black communities. Voter disenfranchisement laws legally sanctioned the violent overthrow of local governments.

The civil rights movement of the post-World War II era challenged legal segregation, including state laws that prevented black Americans from participating in the political process. United States Supreme Court decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and federal legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Acts of 1965 yielded significant results in combating some of the most egregious forms of disenfranchisement and discrimination.

In the 1970s, black communities across the country began to regain local political power by winning majorities on local school boards and city councils, electing black mayors, and gaining representation on county boards of elections in localities across the country. the country.

However, as black communities gained more political power, they also faced resistance from a resurgence of the conservative movement at the state level. The rise of conservative organizations such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute in the 1970s was instrumental in building a state-level political agenda that began to undermine black political power at the local level.

Education, particularly in black-governed cities, became an important goal of such organizations and Republican state officials. In the 1980s, for example, state governments began passing laws to take control of local school districts. The first of these state takeovers occurred in northern cities such as Newark and Detroit, where African Americans made up the majority of the population. In these cities, black communities were stripped of their ability to elect their school board members and govern their schools.

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State takeover of school boards expanded throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, including in southern cities such as New Orleans, as a result of state laws passed by Republican-led state governments that were apparently concerned for improving low-performing school districts. While 30 years of evidence prove it that schools do not improve after such acquisitions, my research shows that the strongest predictor of a state takeover of a school district is not a district’s academic performance, but rather whether it had a majority black student population and whether the city was led by black political officials.

As a result of these acquisitions, state officials abolished majority-black local school boards, which represented the basis for the growth of black political empowerment in the 1970s (just as they did in the 1870s). In most cases, state officials created new state-appointed school boards, and in some cases, particularly in rural communities in the South, school boards were abolished and not replaced at all.

These acquisitions have not been limited to local school districts. Republican-led state governments have taken over local police, courts and financial management in cities with significant or majority black populations. Following the 2020 elections, Republican state governments successfully passed laws allowing state officials to take over governance of local elections in Texas and Georgia. These laws have given state authorities, such as the Georgia State Board of Elections, the power to pass new rules that undermine local governance and authority.

While many Americans and observers of American politics are rightfully concerned about the upcoming election and the threat of another on January 6, American democracy is already under attack by hostile state actors undemocratically overthrowing local governments.

Domingo Morel is an associate professor of political science and public service at New York University and a Public Voices member of The OpEd Project. He is the author of Coming to Power: Race, Education, and American Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2018).

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors..