The nobel prize winning writer and poet, Toni Morrison, has an easy and apt phrase for the most painful assaults upon our rights and liberties.

One recent compilation of her work is "The source of self-regard."

Toni once said "we live in a world …where the body of civil liberties, won cell by cell, bone by bone, by the brave and the dead withers in the searing heat of 'all war, all the time…'"

Toni called the nation to "war against error."

She calls us to arms to "[a] deliberately heightened battle against cultivated ignorance, enforced silence, and metastasizing lies."

Toni saw "a wider war that is fought daily by human rights organizations …"

She saw a "hugely funded and intensified battle of rescue from the violence that is swallowing the dispossessed."

She said, "we are studying the same old curricula that waste the lives they cannot destroy."

"We turn to sorcery summoning up a brew of aliens, enemies, demons, 'causes' that deflect and soothe anxieties about gates through which barbarians stroll; anxieties about language falling into the mouths of others, about authority shifting into the hands of strangers."

We need make no apologies for having a bleeding heart when the opposite is no heart at all.

But how good are we today?

We might take a test on the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court in March of 1857.

Scott was a slave who insisted he had been emancipated as a result of having lived with his master owner in federal territory where slavery was forbidden by the Missouri Compromise.

He was not let go free.

The Supreme Court decided that Negroes were not citizens of the United States and had no right to bring suit in a federal court under the diverse citizenship clause of the Constitution.

The Supreme Court decided that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in the federal territories so he could not become a freeman for having been at Fort Snelling.

Scott was not a free man and when returned to Missouri, that state would determine his status.

Abraham Lincoln called the Scott decision "an astonisher in legal history."

Since those terrible days, blacks won the right to be treated as a person and to vote.

But did they really get to vote.

There were poll taxes one had to pay before one could vote.

There were literacy tests that had to be passed to vote.

Law enforcement targeted blacks for prosecution, and then wouldn't allow blacks to vote if they had a felony record.

Nor could they receive public assistance if they were a felon.

Nor sit on a jury.

Nor live in a white community.

The Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution states that "the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied … on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

The Republicans claimed that the voting standards they enacted were racially neutral.

Not if you cannot pay the poll tax.

Felony disenfranchisement hurt most the black male population.

What doesn't kill those who live in black ghettoes, prompts arrest, confinement, and a lost vote.

In the 1990s, the Urban league concluded, "There is at least one concept that must be recognized if one is to see the pervasive and insidious nature of the drug problem for the African American community. Though difficult to accept, that is the concept of genocide."

Michelle Alexander wrote a penetrating analysis of the condition of the black man in America, titled, "The New Jim Crow."

She stated that "governments use punishment primarily as a tool of social control."

Before Stokely Carmichael became a revolutionary and had expressed his respect for Martin Luther King's non violent predicate for political action, Stokely said non-violent actions can have no effect on men without a conscience.

Let's take just one example - Georgia.

They have newly minted legislation that would end the right to vote by mail without having to provide an excuse.

Stacey Abrams has described Republican efforts to restrict voting rights in Georgia as "racist" and "a redux of Jim Crow in a suit and tie."

She said, "the only connection we can find is that more people of color voted, and it changed the outcome of elections in a direction that Republicans do not like."

The Georgian bills were SB241 and HB 531.

The changes were calculated to harm black voters.

The Brennan Center for Justice has studied the changes.

It ends the right to vote without an excuse.

In the last election, black voters used mail ballots at far higher rates than ever before.

They want to ban sending unsolicited mail ballots.

More ID is required for absentee voting.

There will be a deadline for requesting early voting ballots, 11 days before election day.

It is proposed that there be fewer ballot drop boxes.

The bills would end Sunday voting, reducing the phenomenon of, "souls to the polls." Black voters vote on Sunday more than other groups.

They will ban organizations from distributing grants to help fund elections.

They will prohibit distributing food and drink to voters waiting in line.

They will disqualify provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct. This happens when the State changes voting precincts at the last minute.

It ends automatic voter registration (that boosted registrations enormously).

That's what I call suppressing the vote.

Who could disagree?

State activists are turning up the heat on Georgia companies to stop donating to Republicans sponsors of these bills. But it passed anyhow.

Another path to protect the vote is to pass reform legislation on the Hill.

The HR 1 – the for the People Act - is that reform waiting for Senate support.

It's not the only bill.

But it would cure the most significant effort to suppress the vote.

The congress must vote an end to the filibuster so we can have a majority vote in the Senate in support of this bill.

Now you have something to call your elected officials about – to demand that they vote for HR 1 to regain the greatest access to voting for all Americans.

That would be a good start – on the way to protecting this democracy.