Judge Jefferson Griffin, a Republican who lost his November race for the North Carolina Supreme Court, has created a scene by refusing to concede the race for five months, and recently a 2001 photo has surfaced of him wearing a Confederate uniform at a fraternity party when he was a student at the University of North Carolina. Griffin insists that the photo “does not represent the person I am today.” If it’s true that he no longer supports the Lost Cause, a mythology that glorifies the Confederates that attacked the Union, then he should also give up the lost cause of election subversion.
If it’s true that he no longer supports the Lost Cause, then he should also give up the lost cause of election subversion.
Incumbent Justice Allison Riggs, the Democrat in the race, won the election by 734 votes, but by challenging 65,000 ballots that were cast in November, Griffin continues to try to whittle down the electorate after the fact to tip the race in his favor. A Friday ruling by a three-judge panel on the Republican-controlled appeals court — on which Griffin, who recused himself, sits — ruled in Griffin’s favor. The panel decided 2-1 that the 65,000 voters whose eligibility Griffin challenges should have 15 business days to prove they were eligible to vote.
But the North Carolina Supreme Court intervened Monday with a stay against the appeals court ruling. We hope it’s more than a temporary pause and that the Republican majority on the state’s highest court agrees with the judge who dissented from Friday’s appeals court ruling. That dissenting judge argued that Friday’s ruling amounts to “changing the rules by which these lawful voters took part in our electoral process after the election to discard their otherwise valid votes,” and he rightly said that “an attempt to alter the outcome of only one race among many on the ballot is directly counter to law, equity, and the Constitution.”
If the appeals court ruling is allowed to stand, then some percentage of 65,000 North Carolina voters will have seen their vote erased.
Confederates lost the Civil War, but as many historians of Reconstruction have noted, the South won the culture war. Consider that Griffin, then a college student, was proudly posing in Confederate grays 136 years after that side surrendered at Appomattox.
While the particular myths of the Lost Cause have varied over the years, the motivation stays the same: Lies about the past are told to help people in power hold on to it in the present. Historic voter turnout in North Carolina in 2008 helped send Barack Obama to the White House, and since then the party that lost that race has been pushing the myth of “voter fraud.”
With the NC NAACP, a coalition of North Carolinians sued then-Gov. Pat McCrory to block the monster voter suppression law he signed in 2013. In federal court, we asked Republicans who claimed they were concerned about widespread voter fraud to produce evidence it existed. They could not then, and they cannot now. Voter fraud is the bogeyman they warn about to keep the Lost Cause alive today. I do not question Griffin’s sincerity when he says he regrets wearing a Confederate uniform nearly a quarter century ago. He may also regret the Confederate flag his fraternity used to fly at its “Old South” ball. They’re symbols of another era. But they are symbols of a story that says Black Americans having political equality hurts white people. This is the story of the Lost Cause. It’s a lie. Griffin lost. He may not like that result, but that doesn’t mean something nefarious happened. When all the votes legally cast in North Carolina were counted last November, Griffin lost. He may not like that result, but that doesn’t mean something nefarious happened. His ongoing challenge to North Carolinians’ choice has become its own lost cause, deeply rooted in the tradition of myths that have kept some people re-enacting the Civil War for 160 years. For a court to rule in support of this challenge is to establish a precedent as dangerous as the Plessy v. Ferguson decision that propped up Jim Crow for almost 60 years. It’s past time to hang up (literally and figuratively) the Confederate uniform and give up the belief system that drives Lost Cause thinking. North Carolina does better when more people vote. Any politician who doesn’t acknowledge that can’t be trusted to represent the will of the voters. Any judge who doesn’t believe that cannot faithfully interpret our state or federal constitution. The moral foundations of “we the people” are at stake in this attempt at election subversion. Each of us has a responsibility to stand against the lies that have kept the Lost Cause alive this long.
The Rev. Dr. William Barber
The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II is founding director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School. With Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, an Assistant Director at the Center, he is the author of “White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy.” 
