AND THEN WE WONDER WHY THEY DON'T VOTE FOR REPUBLICANS:

Shortly after he won in 2016, the then president-elect thanked African Americans - for not voting in large numbers. "The African American community was great to us," he told a crowd in Grand Rapids, Michigan. "They came through, big league. Big league. And frankly, if they had any doubt, they didn't vote, and that was almost as good, because a lot of people didn't show up, because they felt good about me."

This time around, Trump was not so smug. By the morning after the election, it became clear that the presidency would be decided by the votes still being counted in big cities in key states: Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta, Phoenix and Las Vegas. White people are a minority in all of them. In Atlanta and Detroit, African Americans are a majority; in Milwaukee and Philadelphia, they outnumber white people.

State troopers beat civil rights protesters in Selma, Alabama on 7 March 1965.

 State troopers beat civil rights protesters in Selma, Alabama on 7 March 1965. Photograph: Unknown/AP

According to Trump, these votes were illegitimate by dint of where they were cast. "Detroit and Philadelphia are known as two of the most corrupt political places anywhere in our country - easily," he said. "They cannot be responsible for engineering the outcome of a presidential race."

This was a new twist in the racial logic of the American right, which has gone from blocking Black people from voting to allowing them to vote as long as their votes don't all get counted.

It is important to remember that the US was a slave state for more than 200 years - and an apartheid state, after the abolition of slavery, for another century. Throughout that time, in certain parts of the country, all Black votes were, by definition, illegal, and conservatives worked hard to keep it that way. It has only been a nonracial democracy for 55 years. And that short reign now hangs in the balance.

In 2013, just a year after turnout rates for Black voters surpassed that for white voters for the first time, the supreme court gutted the Voting Rights Act, which provided some legal protections for Black voters in places where they had once been excluded.

Lewis's home state of Georgia soon got to work thwarting the Black vote with weapons more subtle than teargas and billy clubs. The state cut the number of polling stations by almost 10%, purged tens of thousands of voters from the rolls simply because they had not voted for a while, and suspended the registrations of another 50,000 people - mostly Black - for discrepancies as minor as omitting a hyphen in their name. Those long lines we witnessed around the election were not simply voter enthusiasm - they were also voter suppression.

The trouble is that as white people become a minority in the US, efforts to disfranchise non-white voters necessarily become ever more crude and ever more desperate, but cannot be guaranteed to produce results. The sums just don't add up. The group sought for exclusion is growing at a faster rate than can plausibly be excluded.

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