North Carolina’s new voter restrictions have been called out for what they are — deliberate attempts to curb African-American voting. The more Gov. Pat McCrory and Republican legislative leaders defend this over-reaching law, the further back they set our state.

A federal appeals court in Richmond ruled last week that a new voting law enacted by the N.C. General Assembly in 2013 and signed by McCrory was intentionally designed to weaken the growing clout of African American voters.   

This goes way beyond voter ID. The Republican leaders behind the restrictions didn’t just rework the law on a hunch. According to Judge Diana Gribbon Motz, writing for the panel, legislative leaders requested data, by race, on several voting practices. “Upon receipt of the race data, the General Assembly enacted legislation that restricted voting and registration in five different ways, all of which disproportionately affected African Americans,” Motz wrote.

For example, lawmakers reduced early voting by a week, eliminated same-day registration and stopped the practice of letting voters who show up in the wrong precinct cast ballots.

“The new provisions target African Americans with almost surgical precision” and “impose cures for problems that did not exist,” Motz wrote. “Thus the asserted justifications cannot and do not conceal the State’s true motivation.”

Despite occasional talk of a GOP big tent, African Americans overwhelmingly vote Democratic. Since 1980, an average of 88 percent of the black vote has gone to Democrats, and nothing said in the parties’ recent national conventions is likely to make them switch. African Americans are more likely to stay home than vote Republican, and the North Carolina voting law discourages them just enough to make that happen.

McCrory and Republican legislative leaders intend to appeal the ruling. They point out that the three judges who made this decision are Democrats and accuse the court of trying to help elect Hillary Clinton as president and Roy Cooper as governor. But the court’s revelation about the use of data to pinpoint voting practices favored by African Americans is damning evidence, and not just in a legal sense. It supports the suspicion that this is a modern day Jim Crow law intended to disenfranchise African Americans.

People who think this controversy is just about showing an ID when you vote are missing the story. Republican lawmakers out to undermine Democrats targeted a voting segment that has faced repression and discrimination throughout history. That cannot stand.