In the summer of 1990, civil rights and
voting rights activists from across the South met in Waveland, Mississippi
to discuss what they saw as a growing threat to minority participation
in electoral politics: The high cost of running for office.
Speaking at the conference, Dr. Gwen Patton,
a former leader of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee from
Alabama, made the link between campaign finance reform and voting rights.
"We have fought and died for the right
to vote. But what good is the right to vote if we dont have candidates
to vote for?" she asked.
Following the conference, activists developed
a legal memorandum that was sent to law professors, attorneys, and law
students. The goal of the memo was to find a legal way to challenge the
private funding of elections as a violation of voting rights.
Over a decade later, the movement among
voting rights activists to reform the campaign finance system has borne
fruit. A half-dozen lawsuits across the county have been filed challenging
the impact that money in politics has on minority communities.
Although most of the suits have been dismissed,
activists are encouraged by the groundswell of support from civil rights
groups and the Black community for reforms. These activists see their movement
as a continuation of the fight to outlaw other forms of political injustice,
such as the poll taxes and the discriminatory all-White nomination processes
they fought in the 1960s.
"Were redefining campaign finance reform
as a civil rights issue," said Stephanie Wilson, executive director of
the Fannie Lou Hamer Project, a coalition of groups challenging the so-called
"wealth primary." "Big money in politics directly impacts communities of
color by restricting our political and social participation."
Race and Reform
Until recently, campaign finance reform
was thought of as a "White" issue, said Spencer Overton, a law professor
at the University of California-Davis, who has written extensively on campaign
finance and civil rights.
Overton said the perception exists because
most groups working on the issue have done little to reach out to African-Americans.
"The few outreach efforts have been perceived
as strategic attempts to co-opt Black support for specific campaign reform
proposals, without any real effort to understand the particular problems
that the existing campaign finance systems creates in Black communities,"
Overton said.
Yet, campaign finance reform should be
something that Blacks should worry about and be a part of, he added.
The lack of attention to gun control, health care, and other issues impacting
the Black community can be directly attributed to the lack of reform in
the campaign finance system, Overton said.
In July, to remedy the small number of
African-Americans involved in the campaign reform movement, activists formed
the Fannie Lou Hamer Project. Based in Atlanta, Georgia, the project is
a coalition of civil rights and community-based organizations whose mission
is to educate African-Americans about the role of big money in politics
and how it impacts communities of color.
"Lots of people out there talk about voter
education, but who are we voting for and how does it help or hurt our communities,"
said Stephanie Wilson, executive director of the Project.
Gwen Patton, one of the founders of the
Project, said the fight against record amounts of money in the political
process is an extension of the battle for voting rights Blacks fought for
in the early 1950's and 60's. "The voting rights struggle was not one simply
of passive participation by voting it-included in its intent, for those
who were locked out, to have an opportunity for active participation,"
Patton said.
"One of the foremost tenets in the 1965
Voting Rights Act was to remove all barriers so that grassroots people
themselves could run for office."
Modern Day Poll Tax
The Fannie Low Hamer Project has partnered
with campaign finance reform groups such as Public Campaign and the Center
for Responsive Politics. The group has also set up booths and workshops
on campaign finance reform at both the Republican and the Democratic national
conventions, Wilson said.
The Project helped the NAACP draft a resolution
supporting public financing of elections, instead of continuing to let
candidates be financed by private interests. Perhaps the most promising
tools the group sees in its fight against the campaign finance system are
lawsuits challenging the system as discriminatory.
The lawsuits, said John Bonifaz, executive
director of the National Voting Rights Institute in Boston and a founder
of the Fannie Lou Hamer Project, said the campaign finance system of today
has replaced the poll tax of the past as the newest barrier to political
inclusion.
"Its an issue not just faced by minority
candidates," Bonifaz said. "But race certainly compounds the problem.
There is no question that people of color are significantly handicapped
by this system more than their White counterparts. Lawsuits challenging
the so-called wealth barrier have been filed in Georgia, New York, and
North Carolina. Most of the lawsuits have been thrown out by judges who
say the campaign finance system does not preclude people of color from
voting."
But Bonifaz said the judges have misread
case law on the subject. For example, he said, in a 1953 case before the
U.S. Supreme Court, the justices ruled that an all-White political organization
in Texas which was only open to White voters and had nominated candidates
to run for the Democratic Party primary, limited Black participation even
though it did not keep them from voting.
The High Court ruled that the group had
become "part of the machinery for choosing officials and required constitutional
scrutiny." The Court then struck down the group's nominating process, finding
that it barred Blacks from an "elective process that determines who shall
rule and govern."
Bonifaz said groups involved in the Fannie
Lou Hamer Project will continue to pursue the lawsuits, noting that many
of the lawsuits filed by civil rights activist in the 50's and 60's were
originally dismissed. A lawsuit filed in North Carolina may hold more promise,
Bonifaz said, since the state constitution specifically prohibits wealth
barriers to electoral involvement.
"Its similar to the fight over equal funding
in education," Bonifaz said. " Although the Supreme Court said that education
is not a constitutional right, many states constitutions do guarantee
equal education. The same thing applies to wealth as a barrier to elective
office."
Jennifer Wilson, director of the Fannie
Lou Hamer Project, said the movement to reform the campaign finance systems
is picking up steam in communities of color.
"People are starting to see that its not
about skill or qualification, but money," she said. "Any time you have
a situation like that the community is disadvantaged and people begin to
see that when you start to show how this ties in to other issues in the
community."
The series was made possible by funding
from the J. Roderick MacArthur Foundation.