Black People Invented Democracy?

 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a fucking moron. I really do not like her and if she is on the Democratic ticket in 2028 I will either sit out the election or vote Republican depending upon the GOP candidate. If it's Vance, I won't vote for him. If it's Rubio, then I probably would vote for him.

In a podcast interview recently AOC claimed "I think about the civil rights and voting rights movement, and how Black Americans really created democracy in this country... how they literally made something from nothing."

What? I get her point about the importance of civil rights leaders during the 1960s but you can't just throw out a couple of thousand years of history starting in ancient Athens and continuing through the Magna Carta and a little thing called the US Constitution. Granted that rights de jure don't always always translate into rights de facto but give me a break.

Obviously black people didn't invent democracy. However the rights granted in the 14th and 15th Amendments de jure didn't translate into rights de facto everyplace. 

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were primarily aimed at the Southern States where many black people were in fact denied their right to vote through poll taxes and impossible to pass literacy tests. White voters didn't have to worry about those tests because their right to vote was literally grandfathered in. If their grandfathers could vote, then they could vote without having to pass the literacy test. 

Blacks could vote in the South, and elected several black congressmen, prior to the Compromise 0f 1877 which saw the federal government withdraw troops from the South and allowed the Jim Crow era to officially begin. Almost immediately Southern states began instituting poll taxes and literacy tests in order to disenfranchise black voters. Poll taxes were outlawed in Federal Elections by the 24th Amendment in 1964 and in all elections by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1966 case Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections. Literacy tests were banned by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

So it took almost 100 years to translate the rights guaranteed de jure by the 14th and 15th Amendments into actual rights. But that doesn't mean that black people created Democracy. That's just idiotic.