Marathons and Margins: The Road to 2020
While watching the 2020 U.S. presidential election results trickle in by state, Team Girl Friday wondered about the people who worked tirelessly, often over decades with little national recognition, to secure those victories. In the lead up to Inauguration Day, we will share some of those stories here and on Instagram.
Ernie Chambers and Nebraska’s One Blue Vote
As news outlets displayed electoral college maps, for frantic viewers to track progress, one blue dot emerged in Nebraska thanks to Ernie Chambers.
Ernie Chambers has been called a “once-in-a-lifetime-lawmaker.” His deep belief in standing up for the “least, the last and the lost" was evident long before he started his career in politics. In 1963, he was fired from the post office after reporting a supervisor’s racist rhetoric. He responded by staging a protest outside of a dinner hosted for Postmaster John Munnelly. Never one to mince words, the sign he wore said, “I spoke against discrimination in the Omaha post office and was fired.”
That protest was just the beginning. By 1966, he was a well-known barber, community leader, and advocate in North Omaha. Because of his fearless activism, he was featured in the Oscar-nominated documentary A Time for Burning. Just a few years later, at 33-years-old, he entered the Nebraska Legislature to represent his North Omaha district. Over the course of nearly five decades in politics, Ernie Chamber has been equally praised for the bills he helped pass and the ones he opposed. Similar to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s iconic dissents, Ernie Chambers’ fiery filibusters will echo throughout history.
One of those filibusters helped shape the 2020 election. In 2016, Chambers opposed a bill that would have fundamentally altered Nebraska's electoral college votes. Like Maine, Nebraska is able to split presidential electors, giving some left-leaning voters in an otherwise deep red state an opportunity to voice their opinions. While the policy has been in place since 1991, the vote has only split twice. The first time was for Barack Obama in 2008 and the second time was for Joe Biden in 2020. Ernie Chambers’ filibuster, which included reciting song lyrics and quizzing colleagues on how to pour a beer, ensured that Republicans “were one vote short of the number required for a final vote.” At the time he said, “I’m having so much fun, it should be a sin.”
Chambers’ term in the state legislature ended in December 2020. At 83-years-old, he holds the record as Nebraska’s longest-serving legislator and has not decided if he will run again in four years (a necessary hiatus because of term limits). When NPR asked him about his next steps, he said, in part, “Life is hard by the yard but a cinch by the inch. I can only live in this instant. So despite all of the setbacks I've had, I've never been downhearted, never been discouraged, because as long as I have my mind, know who I am, what I want to try to do, nothing can defeat me.”
Whether or not he returns to office, his legacy of resilience and perseverance is already cemented. For the majority of his career, he was the first or the only in some capacity. He was usually the only non-white state senator in Nebraska and while he often voted with the Democrats, he remained an Independent. At one point, he was also the sole openly atheist member of any U.S. state legislature. Chambers’ accomplishments include abolishing the death penalty (albeit temporarily), divesting from businesses in apartheid South Africa, backing criminal justice reforms, protecting the environment, defending LGBTQ rights, and supporting reproductive health rights.
The Black Belt’s Blue Ripple in the Deep South
The Black Belt: where geology, history, and politics collide in the United States.
Most of the stories you will find in Marathons and Margins stretch over several years, decades even, but not this one. To learn more about the sea blue ripple across the Deep South in election maps, you need to start millions of years ago in the Cretaceous Period.
Sandwiched between its celebrity predecessor, the Jurassic Period, and its successor, the Paleogene Period, the Cretaceous started 145 million years ago and ended 66 million years ago. To put this in context for my fellow 90s kids, Cera and Ducky from The Land Before Time would have lived in the Late Cretaceous epoch (and Little Foot would have actually lived in the Late Jurassic epoch according to experts who talked to Insider).
During this period, the southern portion of the U.S. was covered by shallow, tropical seas. When marine plankton (tiny single-celled drifters that “turn sunshine into fertilizer”) in those warm seas died and sank to the bottom, they formed heaps of chalk. That process revealed dark, rich soil once the sea levels dropped and North America took the shape we know today. If you look at the maps and illustrations featured in this NPR article, you will see where the U.S.’s southern coastline in the Cretaceous period traces the arc of fertile soil known as the Black Belt.
Millions of years later, plantation owners and farmers took note of the soil in the Black Belt. It produced better crops, particularly cotton. According to Craig McClain, the Executive Director of the Louisiana University Marine Consortium, “In 1859 alone a harvest of over 4,000 cotton bales was not uncommon within the belt. And yet, just tens of miles north or south this harvest was rare.” Greedy and cruel, those plantation owners enslaved Africans to produce as much cotton as possible.
After slavery was abolished, some Black Americans like my ancestor, Benjamin Sterling Turner, remained in the Black Belt. He was the first Black congressman from Alabama. Focused on forgiveness and economic recovery, he wanted to reconstruct the country by “restoring peace and repairing economic damage in the war–ravaged South.” Of his Black constituents he said, “These people have struggled longer and labored harder, and have made more of the raw material than any people in the world.”
With those lofty goals of Reconstruction sabotaged and a rise in white supremacist groups inflicting political and physical violence, many Black families moved as part of America’s Great Migration. For those who remained in the South, it took several generations of movements and protests against discriminatory voting practices to truly gain the right to vote. After the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, in a near-perfect mirror of the Cretaceous coastline, a blue ripple of votes for Democrats along the Black Belt’s predominately Black counties started to emerge on election maps.
Janine Pease and the 1983 Lawsuit to Make Every Native Vote Count
After the 2020 election, no one will be able to discount the power of the Native Vote. There are a number of pivotal cases that strengthened the movement. One is Windy Boy v. Big Horn County.
Story coming soon!