Urban League of Rochester
ATLANTA, GEORGIA (APRIL 12, 2022) – Factions of state and federal lawmakers, working in concert with shady political operatives and violent extremists, are dangerously close to dismantling American democracy and establishing autocratic rule.
The National Urban League’s 2022 State of Black America® report, “Under Siege: The Plot to Destroy Democracy,” outlines the conspiracy and the urgent case for a national mobilization to protect and defend our most sacred constitutional right.
“The anti-democracy wave that began to rise after record-high Black voting rates in 2008 and crested with the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder to gut the Voting Rights Act has now broken against ‘The Big Lie,’ the relentless campaign to invalidate the 2020 election,” National Urban League President and CEO Marc H. Morial said.
Using data and analysis from research partner, The Brennan Center for Justice, this year’s edition of The State of Black America exposes the four main tactics employed in the plot: gerrymandering, voter suppression, misinformation, and intimidation.
“Politicians have used these tactics for generations, to exclude voters of color and to give their parties an edge,” Morial said. “But never before has the nation seen such an insidious and coordinated campaign to obliterate the very principle of ‘one person, one vote’ from the political process.
‘It is an astonishing reversal of a two-century moral arc that has bent, if slowly and unevenly, toward universal suffrage,” he said.
In acknowledgment of Georgia’s status as “ground zero” in the assault on democracy, the National Urban League released the report at an event at Clark Atlanta University featuring students from Atlanta’s four HBCUs, Urban League affiliate presidents from around the country, and other national civil rights leaders.
The release coincides with the 2022 launch of “Reclaim Your Vote,” the National Urban League’s civic engagement campaign, celebrated with a voter mobilization rally on the university’s Promenade.
The release event, which was livestreamed on StateOfBlackAmerica.org and NUL.org, was presented in partnership with AT&T, Geico, and National Grid.
For the first time, The State of Black America includes a companion poll, the Pulse of Black America. Conducted by Benenson Strategy Group, the poll found that an overwhelming majority Black Americans believe strongly in the power of their vote to make a difference when it comes to social and racial justice, police violence, and economic opportunity. But almost as many agree that elected officials are not doing enough to protect voting rights, and are in fact doing more to limit voting rights than to protect them.
The 2022 Equality Index, the National Urban League’s semi-annual calculation of the social and economic status of African Americans relative to whites, is 73.9%, slightly up from the revised 2020 Index of 73.7%. Rooted in the Three-Fifths Compromise of 1787, which counted enslaved African Americans as “three-fifths” of a person, the Index would be 100% under full equality.
Because of a lag in data collection, , the 2022 Equality Index does not capture the full effect of the COVID-19 pandemic or the resulting economic recession, but does capture changes during the pandemic for homeownership, unemployment rates, and school enrollment.
“For these metrics, the 2022 Equality Index illustrates how precarious social and economic gains are for Black Americans,” said economist Rhonda Vonshay Sharpe of the Women's Institute for Science, Equity, and Race, who analyzed the Index for the report. “It is also evidence of how vulnerable Black Americans are to economic and public health crises. The Equality Index is an aggregate analysis of centuries of structural racism that can be a starting point for crafting policy to dismantle anti-Black racism in America.”
Featured authors include:
Senator Chuck Schumer, Majority Leader of the United States Senate
Congress Member Bennie Thompson, Chair of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol
Congress Member Maxine Waters, Chair of the House Financial Services Committee
Damon Hewitt, President & Executive Director, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law
Nsé Ufot, Chief Executive Officer, The New Georgia Project
Sean Morales-Doyle, Acting Director, Voting Rights, Democracy, Brennan Center for Justice
The full report is available at StateOfBlackAmerica.org.
The National Urban League is a historic civil rights organization dedicated to economic empowerment in order to elevate the standard of living in historically underserved urban communities. The National Urban League spearheads the efforts of its 91 local affiliates through the development of programs, public policy research and advocacy, providing direct services that impact and improve the lives of more than 2 million people annually nationwide. Visit www.nul.org and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram: @NatUrbanLeague.
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