DeWayne Wickham

It’s time for another Revolutionary War. Not a violent conflict like the one that brought this country into existence, but instead one that should be fought with ballots, not bullets.

The necessity for this new war of American liberation became clear to me just days after President Obama led a 50th anniversary march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., to celebrate the event that sparked Congress to pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act. That legislation opened the way for millions of disenfranchised voters — mostly black and Hispanic — to exercise this democracy’s most basic freedom. It provided federal protections to ensure that state and local governments did not create barriers to voting for black people and other minorities.

In his Selma speech, President Obama called on Congress to restore a part of the Voting Rights Act that was struck down in 2013. It required states with a history of racial discrimination, including Virginia, to get pre-clearance before making voting law changes.

“Right now, in 2015 … there are laws across this country designed to make it harder for people to vote,” the president said. “As we speak, more of such laws are being proposed.” Then he called on members of Congress to “make it their mission to restore the law this year.”

His words got a thunderous applause from those who gathered in Selma for the march’s jubilee celebration — but were quickly rejected by Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, who is responsible for scheduling floor votes in the Republican-controlled chamber. Sen. Cornyn said President Obama’s call for reinstatement of the pre-clearance provision is just an effort by the Democratic president to “create phony narratives.” The Senate, he said, should not take up the matter.

Sen. Cornyn is an unrelenting opponent of the pre-clearance provision and a staunch advocate of voter ID laws, such as the one that has been imposed in his home state. It requires Texans to show one of seven forms of government-issued photo identification in order to cast a ballot. Residents can use a U.S. passport, a military ID, a driver’s license, a concealed weapons license, a citizenship certificate, a special new photo ID card or a certificate that the state created for voting purposes.

A federal court concluded that there are at least 600,000 registered voters in Texas who are unable to vote because they can’t meet any of these tests.

Voter ID laws and efforts to roll back the Voting Rights Act are the footings of an American apartheid — an effort to keep power disproportionately in the hands of the white population long after black people, Hispanics and Asians supplant them as this nation’s majority group.

But these hurdles can be overcome. How? By voting in record — revolutionary — numbers, the president told me the morning of his Selma speech. Many minorities whose path to the polls does not have high hurdles still don’t vote. Getting these people to show up at the polls, he told me, “would transform our politics.”

Failing to do this will make it possible for this democracy to morph into an apartheid nation with a political makeup that produces the kind of internal upheaval that once made South Africa a pariah state.

DeWayne Wickham, dean of Morgan State University’s School of Global Journalism and Communication.