Sunday, January 22, 2012

Black leaders to SC gov: You're a minority, too - Boston.com

Black leaders to SC gov: You're a minority, too - Boston.com:

Black leaders to SC gov: You're a minority, too

FILE - In this Aug. 13, 2011 file photo, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley speaks in Charleston, S.C. Civil rights leaders in South Carolina are taking a new tactic to fight the governor's support of law requiring voters to show identification at the poll. 'Your governor, a woman of color, could not vote before ’65,” Rev. Jesse Jackson recently said to a crowd at a historically black college, referencing the 1965 Civil Rights Act. 'She got the right to vote with the rest of us.'FILE - In this Aug. 13, 2011 file photo, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley speaks in Charleston, S.C. Civil rights leaders in South Carolina are taking a new tactic to fight the governor's support of law requiring voters to show identification at the poll. "Your governor, a woman of color, could not vote before ’65,” Rev. Jesse Jackson recently said to a crowd at a historically black college, referencing the 1965 Civil Rights Act. "She got the right to vote with the rest of us." (AP Photo/Alice Keeney, File)
By Jeffrey Collins
Associated Press / January 22, 2012
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COLUMBIA, S.C.—Civil rights leaders bothered by South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley's stance on issues like requiring voters to show their IDs at the polls are reminding the governor that she is a minority, too.

"She couldn't vote before 1965, just as I couldn't," said the Rev. Jesse Jackson, referring to the Voting Rights Act that abolished poll taxes, literacy tests and other ways whites across the Deep South kept minorities from voting.

Jackson and other critics have said the law is merely a new, covert effort to take away the right to vote from older blacks and poor people, groups who historically tend to vote for Democrats and are less likely to have a driver's license or other

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