Republicans have gloated over political science findings that their voter ID laws have not cratered Black turnout. This, they claim, is evidence of their party’s racial innocence. Let’s interrogate that assumption a bit. It doesn’t hold up given that in the state where Republican anti-voting activity is most extreme, that being North Carolina, GOP lawmakers requested racial data when crafting the so-called Monster Voting Law. But perhaps that’s not enough, and we’ll have to dust off the old Critical Race Theory machine. According to the real CRT, a law can be racist even if its drafting was not tainted by strictly racist intent. Given the history of this country, that analysis applies with full force to issue of who gets to vote.

Interestingly, the state of North Carolina was born in a system of biracial, male-only voting. Due largely to an oversight by its slaveholding framers, the North Carolina constitution of 1776 allowed free men of color to cast votes in the state’s elections. This relative liberalism ceased to be operative three generations later with the rise of so-called Jacksonian Democracy. As in state after state across the growing nation, Universal White Male Suffrage coincided with the constriction of voting rights for the handful of free Black men who had erstwhile been able to exercise the franchise. White male suffrage meant suffrage for white men only. The small bits and pieces of biracial democracy were expunged as America committed itself to a strictly limited, flat-planed republic for the country’s white men.

This inextricable link between voting and race would manifest itself with predictable potency in the era of Reconstruction and Southern Redemption. Led by Mississippi, Southern states passed literacy tests, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses to exclude the male descendants of slaves from the South’s white republic. The grandfather clauses were particularly important, because they permitted illiterate white men to vote even though they were unlikely to pass a literacy test. Southern white supremacists erected a backup plan in case their anti-Black gambits were to unintentionally catch white men in the spider’s nest.

In the South, opposition to woman suffrage was tied directly to fears of a multi-racial democracy. While a decent number of white men were okay with their wives and sisters voting, the vast majority of the white-male-only electorate was adamantly opposed to voting rights for Black people, whatever their gender. Woman suffrage opponents used white supremacist fearmongering to scare white, male Southerners into rejecting the 19th Amendment. North Carolina’s 1924 governor’s race was largely decided on these grounds, with suffragist O. Max Gardner losing the election to former Red Shirt leader Cameron Morrison because the former supported women’s right to vote, and the latter successfully wedded woman suffrage to African American suffrage in the electorate’s bigoted mind.

Race was an active variable in debates over suffrage and democracy all the way through the end of the 20th century. Southern whites took only three years to switch their presidential loyalties after Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. North Carolina’s experience, as so often the case, was instructive in broader regional trends. The state had gone for LBJ in 1964 but shifted hard toward Richard Nixon and ultra-segregationist George Wallace in the election of 1968. It requires only a small glop of gray matter to discern why a long-time Democratic stronghold suddenly switched to the Republican Party, and would remain in the red column for all but two presidential elections of the next 52 years.

This is the history–and history’s not over. The Southernized and racially reinvented Republican Party has become a party firmly dedicated to limiting Black political power. Voting rights are a central component of the GOP’s scheme for instantiating a lasting conservative majority. North Carolina Republicans have obsessively sought to enact restrictions on the franchise, no matter how many times the courts rebuff their efforts. In Georgia, Republicans have passed a bill so broad in scope that it prohibits voting-rights activists from handing out bottles of water to voters. Across the country, Black people have to wait twice as long to vote as white people. America, sadly, remains a nation torn between its founding aspirations and its continuing reality. The arc of the moral universe may bend toward justice, but its bend may remain a soft slope for decades and decades to come.