WS Chronicle

Talk of North Carolina’s demise hasn’t been exaggerated – unfortunately.

The Tarheel State is the talk of the nation; a General Assembly and Governor’s Mansion full of neo-conservatives has made us infamous in just a few short months.

In the last week alone, Republican legislators have sent bills to Gov. McCrory that all but do away with a woman’s right to choose and aim to keep black voters at home on Election Day. McCrory – more puppet than leader – is signing these repressive bills willy-nilly, even though, by his own admission, he is ignorant about their content. The Governor was forced to admit during a press conference last week that he didn’t know enough about one of the many provisions in the voter suppression bill he signed into law this week.

We were a state known for our top-notch public university system, progressive cities and burgeoning population; now, we are lumped in with Texas, Arizona, Alabama and the handful of other states where the GOP is running cluelessly wild.

We share your frustration. Its seems our indignant voices, massive protests and pleas for commonsense leadership is just making this lot more determined to wield the power they will have at least until after next year’s general election. The N.C. NAACP has vowed to not sit helplessly and count down the days until the mid-term. It intends to do what the NAACP does – fight.

“The deaths and suffering of the many thousands who fought during the Civil Rights Movement to ensure that race would not prevent a citizen from being able to register and vote in the United States will not be in vain,” said N.C. NAACP Legal Redress Chair Irv Joyner. “We will uphold our debt to the men and women of every race who waged the struggle leading up to the 1965 enactment of the Voting Rights Act to continue the resistance to any efforts by right-wing extremists to destroy the political franchise for racial minorities in North Carolina and other states.”

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has vowed to review states’ new voter laws, but even if the Justice Department finds that N.C.’s suppressive measures are discriminatory, we have a U.S. Supreme Court that has recently shown that it cares little about the voting rights of people of color.

We hope that there are still traces of the North Carolina we knew and loved when the neocons finish their mischief. Reputations aren’t built overnight, but can collapse in just about that span of time.