ONE HUNDRED YEARS FROM FREEDOM: CHARLESTON’S SECOND SECESSION

First-Day Cover of stamp issued to commemorate the start of the Civil War

This year Easter Sunday fell on the anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. In the previous few days the UK, whose lingering racial problems relate to the export of empire, rather than the import of slaves, had released an inquiry commissioned by the Johnson government to prove there was no “institutional racism” in the UK (spoiler: it purported to do just that, but didn’t). In America, Major League Baseball (MLB) announced that in response to what some might consider institutional racism in Georgia’s Republican legislature passing a raft of bills aimed at the returning the state’s voting rights a huge step closer to the Jim Crow era, they were moving the All-Star game out of Atlanta. Yet it was only a few years ago the US Supreme Court, in a decision penned by John Roberts, had in 2013 dismantled most of the 1965 Voting Rights Act; in effect arguing, if not that institutional racism was dead, that it wasn’t a big enough deal anymore for the government to interfere with states making whatever voting rules they pleased.

At the start of the week, I was thinking of a way to bring this story with me to the BBC World Service Weekend on which I appeared Saturday April 10; one of the topics was the new voter suppression laws passed by the Georgia legislature. The piece included a pre-recorded interview with Georgia…