“They came in darkness and they came in chains. And today we strike away the last major shackle of those fierce and ancient bonds,” said President Lyndon B. Johnson 48 years ago today, upon signing the Voting Rights Act.
Recently, the United States Supreme Court struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, which determined which states and jurisdictions are required to seek “preclearance” or approval of new elections laws under Section 5 of the Act. Without Section 4’s formula, no states are subject to preclearance and the federal government will no longer have the power to prevent racially discriminatory election procedures from going into effect.
The Voting Rights Act still has an important role to play in ensuring that the hard fought Reconstruction era amendments remain realized for all Americans. But in 1965, where the courts and local elected officials largely failed, the Voting Rights Act was the only force strong enough to protect the franchise from violence, intimidation, and administrative chicanery.
“Fierce and Ancient Bonds”
The one hundred years between the signing of the Voting Rights Act and the Reconstruction era amendments were considerably ugly for voting rights. In a few Southern states, African-Americans constituted over “40% of the population.” Violence broke out in Mississippi during the 1875 elections, as a reaction to the deluge of recently enfranchised former Black slaves. The Louisiana legislature (among others) implemented the euphemistically dubbed “literacy test” meant only for Black voters, which culminated in capricious jokes like “Spell Backwards Forwards.”
These acts of violence and administrative cruelty devastated Black turnout. Louisiana dropped from 130,334 black voters in 1896 to only 730 in 1910. South Carolina, which was majority Black during Reconstruction, dropped its Black vote to 5,500 for the entire state. Virginia had zero Black voters for any election between 1900 and 1904. (For extensive accounts on post-Reconstruction voting, see Richard H. Pildes, Democracy, Anti-Democracy, and the Canon or Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisment in the South.)
The Supreme Court was ineffective in protecting the rights granted by the Reconstruction amendments as well. In the aftermath of the infamous Colfax massacre (in which armed mobs blocked polls from former slaves and White Republicans) many of the mob’s members were indicted culminating in United States v. Cruikshank. In Cruikshank the SCOTUS failed to hold the elected officials accountable for tacitly allowing paramilitarism, stating that the 14th amendment’s equal protection clause only applies to state action. In Giles v. Harris the SCOTUS failed to end an Alabama law that allowed registrars to arbitrarily determine voter eligibility based on a citizenship test that most Whites did not need to take.
Righting a Wrong
Fast forward to August 6, 1965, when President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on the heels of the historical civil rights movement in America: “This act flows from a clear and simple wrong. Its only purpose is to right that wrong. Millions of Americans are denied the right to vote because of their color. This law will ensure them the right to vote. The wrong is one which no American, in his heart, can justify. The right is one which no American, true to our principles, can deny.”
His words still ring true today. The challenges Americans face at the polls have changed considerably since the Civil War-era and the civil rights movement, but have not diminished in their gravity. Immediately following the Shelby County decision, the Texas officials announced plans to enact one of the nation’s harshest voter ID laws. North Carolina’s new voter ID bill also eliminates pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-old citizens and ends same-day registration. The bill reduces early voting by one week and, by proposing to broaden voter challenger rules, it essentially grants leniency for private groups to scrutinize and intimidate voters at the polls. These are only a few examples of the many attempts to suppress the vote all over the country.
Chief Justice Roberts said it best in the Shelby decision: “voting discrimination still exists: no one doubts that.” Attorney General Eric Holder echoed this in his speech to the National Urban League: “Although mandated by the Constitution, voting rights are not always guaranteed – in practice – without robust enforcement.”
Though the nature of the threat has changed, the need for the hard fought tools of the civil rights movement are still needed now more than ever. Citizens and advocates are calling on Congress today to protect the voting rights of all Americans by rejuvenating the Voting Rights Act.
Kwame Akosah is a second-year law student at Fordham University School of Law. He joins Project Vote as legal intern for summer 2013.
Video via Miller Center of Public Affairs [Public domain]/Wikimedia Commons