TAMPA — In advance of this afternoon’s U.S. Judiciary Sub-Committee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights in Tampa, leaders from the NAACP, ACLU and other organizations held a morning press conference and blasted House Bill 1355, calling it “legislated voter suppression.”

The organization leaders said the house bill, which (among other things) limits the amount of early voting days and makes it more difficult for third-parties to sign up voters, is a direct result of the 2008 elections that elected Barack Obama, the country’s first black president.

Adora Obi Nweze of the NAACP said that when the Civil Rights Voting Act of 1965 was passed, the lawmakers never envisioned a black president would be elected. About 50 percent of black voters voted early in the 2008 election. Many were bused from their churches on the Sunday before the election, and the new law eliminated early voting on the Sunday before the election.

“You know all of this is about 2008,” Obi Nweze said. “The real truth of the matter is we had thousands of voters go to the polls of color and other minorities going to polls in 2008 and it turned this country on its heels. This country in its history or imagination never had any idea that we’d ever have an African American president. That was not the intent when (the 1965) law was signed.”

“So when they woke up screaming, the next morning (in 2008) they woke up with a plan and that plan was to ensure whatever they had to do, through the constitution or any other law they could find to make sure we no longer had that privilege,” said Obi Nweze, who called the new laws “Jim Crow again.”

Here are some other highlights:

Rev. Charles McKenzie of Rainbow PUSH: “We paid too much in blood and sacrifice and we ain’t going back.”

Denise Velazquez, C3 Roundtable, “We know House Bill 1355 is nothing more than legislated voter suppression. We know this for a fact.”

Howard Simon, ACLU director: “Florida is voter suppression and voter disenfranchisement capital of the United States.”

Simon said the state of Florida has been disenfranchising black voters since 1868.

Rev. McKenzie: “We’ll do everything in our power to fight back this swelling tide of meanness, Neo-Confederate sentiment”

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