The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a landmark piece of federal legislation in the United States that prohibits racial discrimination in voting.[7][8] It was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson during the height of the American Civil Rights Movement on August 6, 1965, and Congress later amended the Act five times to expand its protections.[7] Designed to enforce the voting rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, the Act allowed for a mass enfranchisement of racial minorities throughout the country, especially in the South. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the Act is considered to be the most effective piece of civil rights legislation ever enacted in the country.[9]
The Act contains numerous provisions that regulate the administration of elections. The Act's "general provisions" provide nationwide protections for voting rights. Section 2, for instance, prohibits any state or local government from imposing any voting law that results in discrimination against racial or language minorities. Additionally, the Act specifically outlaws literacy tests and similar devices that were historically used to disenfranchise racial minorities.
The Act also contains "special provisions" that apply to only certain jurisdictions. A core special provision is the Section 5 preclearance requirement, which prohibits certain jurisdictions from implementing any change affecting voting without receiving preapproval from the U.S. Attorney General or the U.S. District Court for D.C. that the change does not discriminate against protected minorities.[10] Another special provision requires jurisdictions containing significant language minority populations to provide bilingual ballots and other election materials.
Section 5 and most other special provisions apply to jurisdictions encompassed by the "coverage formula" prescribed in Section 4(b). The coverage formula was originally designed to encompass jurisdictions that engaged in the most egregious voting discrimination in 1965, and Congress updated the formula in 1970 and 1975. In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the coverage formula as unconstitutional, reasoning that it was no longer responsive to current conditions.[11] The Court did not strike down Section 5, but without a coverage formula, Section 5 is unenforceable.[12
Fifty
years ago, Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old anthropology major at Queens College,
went down to Mississippi for Freedom Summer. His first stop was Philadelphia, Mississippi,
where he and Mickey Schwerner, a 24-year-old graduate student in social work at
Columbia University and James Chaney, a 21-year-old volunteer with the Congress
for Racial Equality from Meridian, Mississippi, were sent to investigate a
church burning. Schwerner and Chaney had spoken at Mount Zion Methodist Church
over Memorial Day, urging local blacks to register to vote.
In
1964, only 6.7 percent of African-Americans were registered in Mississippi and
not a single one in Philadelphia’s Neshoba County. The fight for voting rights
was the reason Goodman traveled to Mississippi. “He just thought it was unfair
that an American citizen of voting age was restrained and stopped from voting,”
said his older brother, David.
After its enactment in 1965, the law immediately decreased racial discrimination in voting. The suspension of literacy tests and assignments of federal examiners and observers allowed for high numbers of racial minorities to register to vote.[56]:702 Nearly 250,000 African Americans registered to vote in 1965, one-third of whom were registered by federal examiners.[114] In covered jurisdictions, less than a third (29.3%) of the African American population was registered in 1965; by 1967, this number increased to more than half (52.1%),[56]:702 and a majority of African American residents became registered to vote in 9 of the 13 Southern states.[114] Similar increases were seen in the number of African American elected officials: between 1965 and 1985, African Americans elected as state legislators in the 11 former Confederate states increased from 3 to 176.[115]:112 Nationwide, the number of African American elected officials increased from 1,469 in 1970 to 4,912 in 1980.[82]:919 By 2011, the number was approximately 10,500.[116] Similarly, registration rates for language minority groups increased after Congress enacted the bilingual election requirements in 1975 and enhanced them in 1992. In 1973, the percent of Hispanics registered to vote was 34.9%; by 2006, that amount nearly doubled. The number of Asian Americans registered to vote in 1996 increased 58% by 2006.[41]:233–235
After the Act's initial success in combating tactics designed to deny minorities access to the polls, the Act became predominately used as a tool to challenge racial vote dilution.[56]:691 Starting in the 1970s, the Attorney General commonly raised Section 5 objections to dilutive voting changes, including discriminatory annexations, redistricting plans, and election methods such as at-large election systems, runoff election requirements, and prohibitions on bullet voting.[100]:105–106 In total, 81% (2,541) of preclearance objections made between 1965 and 2006 were based on vote dilution.[100]:102 Claims brought under Section 2 have also predominately concerned vote dilution.[56]:708–709 Between the 1982 creation of the Section 2 results test and 2006, at least 331 Section 2 lawsuits resulted in published judicial opinions. In the 1980s, 60% of Section 2 lawsuits challenged at-large election systems; in the 1990s, 37.2% challenged at-large election systems and 38.5% challenged redistricting plans. Overall, plaintiffs succeeded in 37.2% of the 331 lawsuits, and they were more likely to succeed in lawsuits brought against covered jurisdictions.[117]:654–656
By enfranchising racial minorities, the Act facilitated a political realignment of the Democratic and Republican parties. Between 1890 and 1965, minority disenfranchisement allowed conservative Southern Democrats to dominate Southern politics. After Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Act into law, newly enfranchised racial minorities began to vote for liberal Democratic candidates throughout the South, and Southern white conservatives began to switch their party registration from Democrat to Republican en masse.[118]:290 These dual trends caused the two parties to ideologically polarize, with the Democratic Party becoming more liberal and the Republican Party becoming more conservative. The trends also created competition between the two parties,[118]:290 which Republicans capitalized on by implementing the Southern strategy.[119] Over the subsequent decades, the creation of majority-minority districts to remedy racial vote dilution claims also contributed to these developments. By packing liberal-leaning racial minorities into small numbers of majority-minority districts, large numbers of surrounding districts became more solidly white, conservative, and Republican. While this increased the elected representation of racial minorities as intended, it also decreased white Democratic representation and increased the representation of Republicans overall.[118]:292 By the mid-1990s, these trends culminated in a political realignment: the Democratic Party and the Republican Party became more ideologically polarized and defined as liberal and conservative parties, respectively; and both parties came to compete for electoral success in the South,[118]:294 with the Republican Party controlling most of Southern politics.[
On
June 21, 1964, the young civil rights activists were arrested by the Neshoba
County police and then abducted by the Klan. Their bodies were found 44 days
later in an earthen dam. Goodman and Schwerner, both white, had been shot once.
Chaney, who was African-American, had been mutilated beyond recognition. Martin
Popper, the attorney for the Goodman family, called it “the first interracial
lynching in the history of the United States.”
The
murders of Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner were the starkest example of the
brutality the Freedom Summer volunteers encountered from local whites. Freedom
Summer “produced almost as many acts of violence by local whites as it did
black voters,” wrote historian David Garrow. Mississippi didn’t change until
Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights
Act on August 6, 1965. “A lot of people lost their lives
getting that Voting Rights Act into place.
The
legislation eliminated the literacy tests and poll taxes that for so long
prevented blacks from registering to vote in Mississippi and other Southern
states and made sure those states didn’t adopt new voter suppression tactics in
the future. The VRA transformed Mississippi and the rest of the country. Today,
the Magnolia State has more black elected officials than any other state.
The
50th anniversary of Freedom Summer happens to coincide with the first
anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v Holder,
where the Supreme Court’s conservative majority invalidated Section 4 of the
VRA on June 25, 2013. As a result, states like Mississippi, with the worst
history of voting discrimination, no longer have to clear their voting changes
with the federal government.
Section
4 provided the formula for covering states that had to submit their voting
changes under Section 5 of the VRA (known as “preclearance”). Chief Justice
John Roberts struck down Section 4 for two reasons: it was based on outdated
data from the 1960s and 1970s, he argued and violated what he called the
“fundamental principle of equal sovereignty” among states. Though Roberts
conceded “voting discrimination still exists; no one doubts that,” he stated
that the “extraordinary measures” of the VRA were no longer justified.
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