Why GOP's Southern Strategy Moved North

(The Root) -- Republicans have devised an insidious plan to steal the 2012 presidential election, and it's a page torn from the history books about Jim Crow South.

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law compiled a comprehensive report showing that 24 new laws and two executive actions restricting the right to vote have passed in 19 states since 2011.The reason? GOP lawmakers claim that the laws are designed to combat voter fraud. But opponents of the laws, including the Justice Department, see them as the disenfranchisement of African-American voters -- and covert subversion of the Voting Rights Act -- that is central to the GOP's strategy for the 2012 elections. And the concerted effort to fulfill Sen. MitchMcConnell's No. 1 priority of making "Obama a one-term president" is being carried out with military precision.

Perhaps a brief history lesson is in order. After the Civil War and emancipation in 1865, the right of suffrage was broadly exercised by freedmen. During Reconstruction, African-American men achieved high office in state legislatures as well as in the U.S. Congress. But a set of restrictive voting laws -- including poll taxes, literacy tests and grandfather clauses -- quickly reversed progress and led to 100 years of second-class citizenry.

The remnants of this sordid past are still evident in the racial disparities present in our politics. Even today, with an African American in the Oval Office, not one sits in the Senate. The cultural divide that kept the American South solidly red