Not our first rodeo: voting rights

As is frequently the case, I choose a book from the library for one thing and find that the message for me is extraordinarily contemporary and important. Thus, my interest in Creole New Orleans presented the following:

From R. L. Desdunes, 1895 in the Crusader, " "This question of qualified suffrage is one in which all the comon people, whether colored, or white, are vitally interested." He rued the day "when once the wealthy classes get the laws as them want them. The elect of creation as they believe themselves to be, aim to kill the right [of universal suffrage] a short cut to assured and permanent ascendancy."
p. 258, Arnold R. Hirsch in Creole New Orleans edited by Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon.

Quoting George Labat in 1929, "Without the ballot our race will always be...segregated and deprived of our rights and privileges" (such twentieth-century innovations) "were enacted solely to disfranchise our race and to eliminate us from politics." p. 268 of the same anthology.

As Buffy Ste. Marie said later, "round and round and round in the circle game."