Cecil Canton, my colleague on the CBC Executive Committee, has passed along this “Weekly Commentary” from Jesse Jackson, Sr., about the erosion of voting rights in Alabama. Very ironically but very predictably, once the Supreme Court ruled that the states subject to federal monitoring under the Voting Rights Act had moved beyond the need for such oversight, their state governments have quickly resurrected many of the strategies that they had employed to suppress the African-American vote during the Jim Crow period.

And as Cecil states in his e-mail, “Clearly, as academics we justify protecting what we do by saying that we teach our students to be able to more effectively participate in our democracy. If that is true, then we need to be first in the fight to protect the most essential part of that democracy: the franchise! Especially in those places where it is most under attack and for…