Beyond Charlottesville - Terry McAuliffe Page 0,8

governor’s mansion and make sure to include a visit to the former slave quarters. As you enter the mansion, to this day, there are two staircases going upstairs on either side of the formal front hall—the one on the right, built much narrower, was for the slaves to use.

What was shocking to me, as I revisited Virginia history with a fresh sense of purpose, was the open way that racists in positions of power went about pushing back against voting rights of African Americans in the early twentieth century. They were blatant in their racism.

DISFRANCHISING THE NEGRO read a New York Times headline from Richmond, Virginia, in May of 1901 about the Virginia constitutional convention that year. “One of the chief objects in calling this convention was to disfranchise the negro voter,” the article said. “Many of the most influential men in the State have indicated a disposition to go slow in the matter of taking away the votes of the negroes.” After the convention opened that June, The Times reported that the notorious racist Carter Glass declared that he would “rather be expelled from the convention than not carry out” the move to deny African Americans the vote.

Glass “was received with a storm of applause” by the gathering, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported on August 15, 1901. “He spoke with the earnestness, the fire and the vim that have characterized all of his addresses in the Senate and in the Constitutional Convention.… When he made the remark that the State Convention of last year in its platform did not enter into any combination with 15,000 negroes to permit them to vote upon the question of their disfranchisement, the greatest demonstration of the day occurred. It was evident that the audience was overwhelmingly in sympathy with the sentiment of the remark.” That article quoted Glass himself declaring that the gathering “signalizes a revival of … that fundamental pronouncement of the Declaration of Independence which asserts equally among equals.” Now that is some twisted rationalizing.

And to think Glass, who would go on to have a long career in Washington, was a Democrat. That’s something we can never forget. In the end, Glass and the other racists had their way, making changes to the Virginia Constitution “to eliminate the darkey as a force in Virginia politics,” as Glass put it, through poll taxes, literacy tests, and laws to disenfranchise felons.

“Discrimination!” Glass explained that year. “Why, that is precisely what we propose. That, exactly, is what this Convention was elected for—to discriminate to the very extremity of permissible action under the limits of the Federal Constitution, with a view to the elimination of every Negro voter who can be gotten rid of legally.”

It’s our job now to shine a bright light on that history of overt racism embedded in our institutions. We can highlight the progress we’ve made overall since then, but not at the expense of working to undo the damage. Soaring rhetoric is great, but I like action. I like to focus on ways to make actual change. So as a candidate for governor in 2013, I’d campaigned on restoring voting rights.

Felons who have done their time and completed probation deserve a second chance. At the time I became governor in 2014, the threshold for a crime to be considered a felony was two hundred dollars. So you could write a bad check for $201 to pay for groceries and lose your voting rights for life, even long after you’d done your time and served your probation. We want everyone to have a stake in their government. We want everyone to know that if they do their part, if they pay back their debt to society, they can be made whole again. We can’t continue to uphold a system that is stacked against so many of our people. In forty states, it’s automatic for felons who’ve done their time to regain their voting rights.

Effective action starts with doing your homework. We spent more than a year laying the groundwork for an across-the-board move on voting rights. First we moved drug offenses from violent to nonviolent. We kept looking at ways to get more people back the ability to vote. I remember in February 2015, some buddies from law school visited me at the governor’s mansion, John Cohlan, Chris Petersen, and John Boland, and we were brainstorming ideas for restoration along with Levar. That was when it really hit me that it was time to make a splash.

“I’m sick of doing this incrementally,”