According to Experts, Trump Can't Cancel An Election. According to History, They're Wrong.
It's true that America hasn't canceled an election in its 250 year history...unless you're Black
Before April 24, 2017, tourists on New Orleans’ historic Canal Street could visit a monument to domestic terrorism.
Commissioned by city officials in 1932, the 35-foot-tall obelisk commemorated the Battle of Liberty Place, the 1874 paramilitary operation that overthrew the Louisiana state government.
“McEnery and Penn, having been elected governor and lieutenant-governor by the white people, were duly installed by this overthrow of carpetbag government, ousting the usurpers, Governor Kellogg (white) and Lieutenant-Governor Antoine (colored),” the monument’s plaque proudly proclaimed. “United States troops took over the state government and reinstated the usurpers, but the national election of November 1876 recognized white supremacy in the South and gave us our state.”
In December 1874, white terrorists in Mississippi organized a similar campaign of murder and violence to oust Black elected officials. The “Mississippi Plan” culminated with the 1890 state constitutional convention. (Not to be confused with the civil rights-era Mississippi Plan to protect Jim Crow).
“Let’s tell the truth if it bursts the bottom of the universe,” proclaimed convention president Solomon Saladin Calhoon in his opening statement. “We came here to exclude the Negro. Nothing short of this will answer.”
When the aptly named White League in Barbour County, Ala., failed to intimidate Black voters in the 1874 midterms, ex-Confederates stormed the polls, shot an election official’s son and burned the ballot boxes from the county’s predominantly Black precinct while the father ran for help.
It worked.
