The dust has barely settled in South Carolina since the Department of Justice refused to approve the state’s voter ID law, a discriminatory measure which would disenfranchise thousands of eligible voters, many of them African-American, elderly and young people. And yet, undeterred and brazenly determined, the state legislature is already taking another bite at the voter suppression apple.

This time, the legislature is rushing through a law that will severely restrict community-based voter registration drives. House Bill 4549, modeled after a Florida law that forced the League of Women Voters and other civic organizations to abandon voter registration efforts in the state, would effectively shut down community-based voter registration drives in South Carolina, requiring any individual or organization to register with the state before assisting other South Carolinians in registering to vote, and subjecting those individuals or organizations to up to $1,000 in fines, even for honest mistakes like sending the forms to the wrong county or not putting enough postage on the envelopes.

The bill would discourage churches, teachers, colleges, and community centers from helping people to register to vote; it would discourage people like James Felder who, in 1963, while serving his country in the military, helped carry President John F. Kennedy’s body to Arlington National Cemetery, and who in 1970, became one of three black men elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives for the first time since reconstruction. Felder has since made his life’s work registering others to vote and with this new voter suppression bill in effect, he would likely have to give up that work. The bill would also discourage teachers like Dawn Quarles who, since 2008, has helped her students register to vote as part of the government and politics classes she teaches in high school. As we’ve already seen in Florida, restrictions to voter registration will result in discouraging almost all voter registration drives throughout the state.

In 2008, South Carolina was an abysmal 42nd in the nation in voter turnout. Instead of wasting time and resources erecting additional barriers to voting, the state legislature should be encouraging greater participation in elections. Broad political participation strengthens our democracy and ensures the preservation of all our other rights and freedoms. Voter registration groups play an important role in the process, making voter registration more accessible, especially for minority, student and low-income voters. The South Carolina legislature should abandon HB 4549 and focus instead on helping protect the right of all South Carolinians to vote.

Take Action to stop the latest attack on voting rights in South Carolina.

Learn more about voter suppression: Sign up for breaking news alerts, follow us on Twitter, and like us on Facebook.

Terrifying is not a word I’d use to describe myself. I don’t even think it’s a word most other people would use to describe me. But I guess it all depends on your perspective.

I was in East Tampa, Florida a few weeks before the primary, to assess the state’s new election laws, which add prohibitively onerous requirements to anyone who wants to register voters there. I was looking for people who register voters, and the people they sign up, to try to understand how the legislation will affect things on the ground.

East Tampa was a good place to start, because people are still registering voters there: it’s one of a number of jurisdictions where the Voting Rights Act of 1965 requires the federal government to approve any changes to election laws.

It was Monday morning, Martin Luther King Day. The community was getting ready for its annual parade. And Yvette — an African American woman who has registered hundreds of voters in the last couple of years — was planning a voter registration drive in a high school parking lot near the end of the parade route.

When I got to the school, Yvette wasn’t there yet. But a group of black sorority sisters, who were also planning to register voters, were. I introduced myself to one, and asked a few vague questions about their plans. I didn’t get many answers. But I didn’t think much of it.

Until I got the call from Yvette.

She had arrived while I was out with a camera crew, shooting street scenes around the parade route.

She asked me where I was, then barely waited for my answer before she said: “You scared them. You scared them so bad!”

I was perplexed. Who had I scared?

The sorority sisters.

“I got out of the car,” Yvette went on, “and they came running over and said ‘there’s a white lady who was looking for you. Asking about us registering voters.” “I had to tell them ‘she’s alright. She’s with me. She’s alright.”

I felt terrible. But I was also confused. I hadn’t tried to interview them on tape or on camera. I didn’t even have a notebook. The questions I’d asked were hardly probing. And come on, I work for the ACLU. As for the white part, well, it’s true. And according to Yvette, anyway, that was the problem.

“That’s what white folks have done to black people down here.”

I hadn’t felt that there before. The day before, I’d been warmly welcomed in an African-American church. And I’d walked around the Black Heritage Festival downtown for several hours, talking to people. But at church, I’d been introduced by the pastor. And at the Festival, I’d been with Yvette and her friend, another African-American woman. Maybe with somebody vouching for me, people were just too polite to tell me I was scary.

Race did come up a lot that weekend, and not just in the context of registering voters. The local cameraman I hired — who is white — called me the night before the shoot, to ask if it was safe to bring his equipment to the parade. He prefaced the question with the caveat that he didn’t want to sound racist — and followed it with a story of his mother getting caught up in race riots.

Jay-walking across an empty downtown street with Yvette, she teased her friend that they could get arrested for that kind of behavior. Her friend’s answer? “Well, maybe not with the white lady here.”

That there’s deeply ingrained mistrust on both sides is hardly news. But it’s disturbing for a whole host of reasons, not least because of its implications for voter registration.

Making it hard for third parties to register voters may not sound like a big deal. But the data shows African-Americans and Latinos are far more likely than whites to register through voter registration drives, which are often hosted by third parties like the League of Women Voters or the NAACP. (The new rules are so tough that the League of Women Voters has stopped working in Florida.) As Yvette and her friends told me repeatedly, no white person — no matter how well-meaning — will convince an African-American in East Tampa to register to vote.

Not counting my camera crew or police officers, the only white people I saw in East Tampa that day were two representatives of the county elections office and three Obama supporters.

Learn more about voting rights: Sign up for breaking news alerts, follow us on Twitter, and like us on Facebook.

With Florida’s primary just days away, all eyes are on the Sunshine State. And in an effort to shine a light on the state’s new regressive voting laws, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights, chaired by Sen. Dick Durbin, is holding a federal field hearing today in Tampa, Florida.

Florida is just one of many states now enacting discriminatory laws that block Americans from the ballot box. All these laws aim to do one thing: make it harder for people to vote. And who do these laws disproportionately impact? African-Americans, the elderly, people with disabilities, students, low-income and language minority voters.

The state’s new law now makes it nearly impossible for individuals like Belinthia Berry and organizations like the non-partisan League of Women Voters to register voters. For years, Belinthia has registered voters in East Tampa, a predominantly lower-income African-American neighborhood. But now, under Florida’s new law, Belinthia could face major fines if they fail to meet the new burdensome requirements.*

Belintha says, “The problem with the new voter registration law in Florida is that the penalties that they impose for the smallest minute errors that previously weren’t there just make it very cumbersome for any non-profit, third party to want to go out and register voters.”

These restrictions will no doubt have crippling effects on voter participation in this year’s election and have already led groups like the venerable League of Women Voters to pull out of all voter registration efforts in Florida.

The new restrictions on third-party voter registration come packaged as part of a larger elections bill (HB 1355) that contains 80 changes to the state’s election laws. Other provisions include reducing the number of early voting days from 14 to eight; prohibiting early voting on Sunday before an election; and only allowing voters who have moved from one county to another and need to update their address at the polling place to cast a provisional ballot, which may not even be counted.

In another setback to American’s most fundamental right, Florida authorities recently toughened the state’s rules around the restoration of rights, disfranchising nearly one million Florida citizens with past criminal convictions for life. These individuals — who account for nearly one in five disfranchised citizens in the country — are now only able to recover their right to vote through a difficult and burdensome clemency process which has resulted in very few grants of restoration.

We cannot afford to have laws that push people out of the electorate; every eligible American must be able to vote in order for this to be a true democracy.

Read the ACLU of Florida’s statement urging Congress to take action to help prevent any policy that interferes with the fundamental right to vote.

Take Action and ask Attorney General Holder to continue enforcing the Voting Rights Act so that every American can vote.

* The Voting Rights Act of 1965 requires some jurisdictions, including five Florida counties, to get approval from the federal government before making any changes to voting laws and procedures. Hillsborough County, where East Tampa is, is one of those counties; until the changes are approved, people like Belinthia Berry can continue registering voters as before.

Today voters are going to the polls in South Carolina to exercise their most fundamental democratic right: the right to vote. This week we celebrated the life and work of Martin Luther King, and in doing so we recall his championing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Recognizing the pitifully low number of blacks who were eligible to vote at that time, Dr. King believed that until all African Americans were able to participate in the electoral process, there could be no real justice in this country.

Forty-seven years later, we are seeing the resurgence of efforts to enact laws that will have the effect of reducing the number of black people participating in the election. So instead of moving closer to the all-inclusive democracy King dreamed of, we are seeing steps which are calculated to fragment the nation along racial lines. We see this in the thinly veiled, coded references designed to gain support by appealing to uglier, racial feelings. In a sense, the discussions surrounding the South Carolina primaries may be a portent of the coming campaign and the likelihood that King’s dream of a unified country may ever be achieved. Trying to gain political advantage by balkanizing the country may yield short term victories but bodes ill for the country as a whole.

The fact that Martin Luther King seems like an increasingly distant historical figure is only partly explained by the relentless passing of time. The rest can be explained by the limited way in which his life and work is often described. King is most frequently linked with his protests against segregated buses and lunch counters and other examples of apartheid that seem far removed from the present era, a time when an African American occupies the nation’s highest office.

Any complacency about society’s success in addressing the most obvious forms of discrimination is unwarranted. In fact, significant parts of King’s dream remain unrealized and seldom commented upon. Throughout his struggle, King emphasized economic inequalities in American society. In his “I Have a Dream Speech” he railed about the fact that, a hundred years after emancipation, African Americans still lived “on a lonely island of poverty.” He complained that the passage of a century did not change the fact African Americans “still languished in the corners of American Society.” On the day he died, he was protesting the mistreatment of Memphis sanitation workers, a mistreatment that was in part economic.

What would the Martin Luther King who was concerned with the economic justice make of the fact that, in a period of general economic crisis, African Americans are hit twice as hard, enduring an unemployment rate twice that of the nation as a whole? How would he regard the 20 to 1 white/black wealth disparity, a disparity far worse than when he was living? What would he think of the explosive growth in the number of black men incarcerated since his time? How would the man who said “we cannot be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their self-hood and robbed of their dignity” view the draconian and unfair policies which push black children out of schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems?

Most topically, what would the man who dreamed of African-American inclusion in the political and social life of the country make of the role of race in the discussions during the 2012 election year? At a time when race still figures prominently in American life, discussion about it is either suppressed or used as a tool of fear to manipulate voter emotion. Now that economic issues have eclipsed the fear of rising crime, the spectre of Willie Horton has given way to the image of the lazy black person living off unemployment. No doubt he would share the view that talking about black people living off of other people’s money or suggesting that poor black children need to learn the “habit of work” is a calculating and cynical view given the unavailability of employment opportunities for poor black adults and the harsh realities faced by those who can find jobs but who need to work multiple jobs to scrape by.

If King were alive today, he would be continuing the struggle for racial justice and we must too. In the end, we honor him most not by celebrating his achievements but by fighting to achieve the unrealized parts of his dream.

Learn more about racial justice: Sign up for breaking news alerts, follow us on Twitter, and like us on Facebook.