“Today is a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield,” President Lyndon Johnson
said on August 6, 1965, when he signed the Voting Rights Act into law.
The VRA quickly became known as the most important piece of modern
civil rights legislation and one of the most consequential laws ever
passed by Congress. It led to the abolition of literacy tests and poll
taxes; made possible the registration of millions of minority voters;
forced states with a history of voting discrimination to clear electoral
changes with the federal government to prevent future discrimination;
and laid the foundation for generations of minority elected officials.
Inside the US Capitol Rotunda, LBJ announced the signing of the bill
flanked by a bust of President Lincoln, who exactly 104 years earlier
had signed the
Confiscation Act freeing Confederate slaves. Among the many civil rights leaders present on that historic day forty-eight years ago was
John Lewis,
the 25-year-old chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee, who had nearly died four months earlier marching for the
right to vote in Selma, Alabama. He was the only veteran of the “Bloody
Sunday” march to attend the signing ceremony, as historian Gary May
notes in his new history of the VRA, "
Bending Toward Justice."
Lewis remembered that day in August 1965 as “a high point in modern
American, probably the nation’s finest hour in terms of civil rights.”
Twenty-one years later, Lewis won election to Congress from Georgia’s 5
th
House district, representing the hometown of his idol Martin Luther
King Jr. He has the pen LBJ gave him after signing the VRA framed in his
Atlanta home and a bust of the thirty-sixth president in his Washington
office. Without the VRA, there would be no Congressman Lewis or Senator
Rubio or President Obama. “When Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights
Act,” Lewis said on a trip to Alabama in March, “he helped free and
liberate all of us.”
Consider how the VRA transformed American democracy:
—In 1965, only 31 percent of eligible black voters were registered to
vote the in the seven Southern states originally covered by the VRA,
compared to 72 percent of white voters. The number of black registered
voters was as low as 6.7 percent in Mississippi. In Selma, only 393 of
15,000 eligible black voters were registered when LBJ introduced the VRA
in March 1965.
Today, 73 percent of black voters are registered to vote according to
the US Census and black voter turnout exceeded white turnout in 2012
for the
first time in recorded history.
—In 1965, there were fewer than 500
black elected officials nationwide. Today, there are more than
10,500.
—In 1965, there were only
five black members of Congress. Today, there are
forty-four. The 113
th Congress is the most diverse in history, with 97 minority elected representatives.
—Since 1965, the Justice Department blocked at least
1,150 discriminatory voting changes from going into effect under Section 5 of the VRA.
Yet the Supreme Court’s
decision
in late June invalidating Section 4 of the VRA threatens to roll back
much of the progress made over the past forty-eight years. Since the
ruling, six Southern states previously covered under Section 4 have
passed or implemented new voting restrictions, with North Carolina
recently passing the country’s
worst voter suppression law.
The latest assault on the franchise comes on the heels of a
presidential election in which voter suppression attempts played a
starring role, with 180 bills introduced in 41 states to
restrict access to the ballot
in 2011-2012, which NAACP President Ben Jealous called “the greatest
attacks on voting rights since segregation.” The broad scope of
contemporary voting discrimination is why John Lewis
testified before Congress last month that “the Voting Rights Act is needed now like never before.”
The spread of voter suppression efforts to states like Pennsylvania, where over 500,000 registered voters could be
disenfranchised
by a voter ID law before the courts, is a strong argument for
expanding, not eliminating, the key provisions of the VRA. Sections 2
and 3 of the VRA, as currently written, are
no substitute
for Sections 4 and 5. Under Section 2, discriminatory voting changes
can only be challenged after lengthy and expensive litigation, with the
burden of proof on those facing discrimination. Under Section 3, a court
has to find that a state (like
Texas) was guilty of
intentional discrimination,
a very high bar to clear, in order to force it to approve its voting
changes with the federal government for a period of time. Under Section
5, however, the states with the worst history of discrimination had to
prove that their voting changes were not discriminatory before they
became law. As Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in 1966, the
genius of the law was to “shift the advantage of time and inertia from the perpetrators of the evil to its victims.”
The evil of voting discrimination remains all-too-common today, which
is why Congress urgently needs to strengthen the VRA. Representative
James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), the former chair of the House Judiciary
Committee who presided over the overwhelming Congressional
reauthorization of the VRA in 2006, recently told
Congressional Quarterly,
“there are a lot of Republicans who are [on board], but they don’t want
to be publicly named.” If there is indeed a silent majority of
Republicans who still support the VRA, let’s hope they speak up soon.
Otherwise, on the 50
th anniversary of the VRA in 2015, we may be mourning its demise instead of celebrating its transformational impact.
Take Action: Tell Congress to Honor John Lewis with a New Voting Rights Act
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