(VM) – A.C. Cordoza, a former Republican state delegate, should know better. So should every other GOP operative in Virginia who supports an anti-redistricting mailer targeting Black voters in the April 21 referendum.

It’s despicable they’ve raised the specter of Jim Crow – in a state that long suppressed Black turnout through poll taxes, literacy tests and other racist chicanery – as the rationale for state Democrats forcing the referendum to redraw congressional lines.

The mailers invoked images from the civil rights movement, and critics and state officials noted – correctly – those messages are a deliberate, cynical distortion of history.

“Our ancestors fought to represent us,” the mailer says, and then underneath: “Now Richmond politicians are trying to take our districts away.”

Many Black people and some whites died fighting to reduce voting barriers and pressure America to treat people equally. I wonder if the folks behind this piece of tripe know that. Maybe they just don’t care.

Our violent history involving racial injustice should never be trotted out deceptively or to gain cheap political points.

The backlash to the mailer was swift, and it included denunciations from state Attorney General Jay Jones, the NAACP Virginia State Conference and state and congressional politicians representing Virginia.

“My parents and grandparents lived through the reality of Jim Crow in Virginia,” said Jones, Virginia’s first Black attorney general. “They experienced firsthand what it meant when the law and the political system were used to silence Black voices. That history is not a political prop, and it should never be exploited in a misleading attempt to confuse voters.”

Exactly. Elected Democrats want to redraw congressional lines mid-decade in Virginia, after President Donald Trump first demanded Republican-led states rig the lines. He wants to maintain control in this year’s mid-term elections in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Trump is seeking every seat possible because his heartless domestic agenda has eviscerated the social safety net for millions, and his federal agents have treated suspected undocumented immigrants with untold cruelty, violence – and even death.

You might say two wrongs don’t make a right, and that Virginians should refrain from the redistricting machinations that’s occurred in many states, including Texas, Missouri and California.

“I think the redistricting referendum involves gerrymandering Virginia’s congressional districts to make them considerably less fair … in order to achieve partisan objectives and try to counter-balance partisan gerrymanders elsewhere in the country,” Jesse Richman, associate professor of political science at Old Dominion University, told me by email.

Democrats, however, wouldn’t be doing this if Trump hadn’t demolished norms years after the usual redistricting process, which occurs after the decennial census.

The mailers “are misleading,” said Eric Claville, a Norfolk State University political science professor. 

“It’s all part of politics. … It’s up to us to call it out, and to educate people why the redistricting referendum is a good thing,” Claville added.

Democrats currently hold six of the state’s 11 congressional districts. Democrats who control the General Assembly would redraw the lines to make 10 seats favorable to their side.

On another point: Republicans surprised no one when they made Cordoza the front man on the mailer, attempting to deflect criticism because of the racial nature of their pitch. He was the lone Black Republican in the Assembly before he was defeated in his re-election bid in November.

It took a couple of days for the folks behind the mailers to get their stories straight. Cordoza, from Hampton, told The Virginian-Pilot on Monday he thought he was treasurer of the groups behind the campaign. He then said Tuesday he’s chairman of two political action committees linked to the mailers.

“If they don’t like what the mailer represents, they should not be doing the actions that  the mailer brings up, period,” the former delegate said.

His party is fond of exploiting its few African-American elected officials when convenient. They have little clout in spearheading policy, however.

The blood of those who fought for civil and voting rights for all haunts this nation. Their history is not always known by a broad swath of Americans.

Martyrs include Jonathan Daniels, a Virginia Military Institute graduate. As an Episcopal seminarian, he was gunned down in Alabama in 1965 shielding a teenage girl from a shotgun blast. He’d gone to the South to help with voter registration efforts there. VMI’s annual wreath-laying ceremony in Daniels’ honor was just last week.

Alabama state troopers beat and fatally shot Jimmie Lee Jackson as he tried to protect relatives who were part of a civil rights march in 1965. The slaying inspired the first Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march, which became known as “Bloody Sunday.”

There was Vernon Dahmer, who was murdered by Klansman in 1966 in Mississippi. His “offense”? He’d helped collect poll taxes for his neighbors so they wouldn’t have to journey to the courthouse, and he offered to pay the taxes for those who couldn’t afford them.

I could name many other ghastly incidents from that period, most of them in the South.

In Virginia, school walkouts, lunch counter sit-ins and the fight for interracial marriage were all part of the struggle.

Do the folks behind the redistricting mailers understand that history? How can they be so ignorant about how contemptible their ploy is?

They deserve every bit of opprobrium coming their way.