On March 7, 1965, hundreds of civil rights activists departed from Selma headed toward Montgomery, Alabama, along US Route 80. The march, part of a larger voting rights movement taking place across the South, was led by twenty-five-year-old John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Rev. Hosea Williams of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
Everything went according to plan until the marchers — many of them residents of Selma, joined by clergy, students, and national movement organizers — crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where they encountered a wall of Alabama state troopers on the other side. The police attacked, beating the marchers with nightsticks, firing tear gas, and charging them on horseback during a day of violence later known as Bloody Sunday. The assault was captured on video, and during that evening’s NBC broadcast, confused viewers thought they were watching footage of atrocities in Nazi Germany.
On August 6, in the presence of Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr, and other civil rights leaders, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965. The law banned tactics long used to suppress black voters, allowed federal monitoring and intervention of elections, and permitted the government to bring lawsuits against states or counties that violated equal ballot access. It also created a preclearance process, in which states with a history of voter discrimination, as judged by a coverage formula, were required to seek preapproval from the attorney general before changing any voting or election procedures.
King called the VRA a “shining moment” and suggested that the law might make mass protests unnecessary. SCLC strategist James Bevel went even further, arguing, “There is no more civil rights movement.” The highs were high, and “for a very brief interval, the optimists had things their way,” concluded the historian C. Vann Woodward.
The progress made during that time is now being reversed by the Supreme Court, which has worked tirelessly to weaken the Voting Rights Act and threaten the ballot access of millions of Americans. At the same time, the civil rights movement’s fight for equal rights has never been fully realized due to the Senate’s outrageously malapportioned system of representation that favors states over people.
Optimism was understandable. In Mississippi, the site of 1964’s harrowing Freedom Summer, voter registration grew from 10 percent of eligible black voters to 60 percent in two years. Alabama’s percentage of registered black voters increased from 23 to 55 percent, and Georgia’s from 28 to 53 percent. Over the next ten years, the number of registered black voters across the entire South increased from 31 to 73 percent, while the number of black elected officials nationwide climbed from some 500 to nearly 11,000. In 1975, the VRA was expanded to cover Latino/Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans. And in 2006, it was extended for another twenty-five years.
But in 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court overruled Congress’s reauthorization and popular support for voting rights and concluded that the preclearance requirement was no longer necessary. A seventy-three-year-old Lewis called the ruling a “dagger in the heart of the Voting Rights Act.”
The ruling had immediate and devastating consequences. In the wake of the decision, noted Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in Tyranny of the Minority, “states and counties previously subject to federal supervision aggressively purged their voter rolls and closed hundreds of polling stations, particularly in Black neighborhoods.” Just eight years after the ruling, “twenty-six states — including ten that had previously been subject to federal government preclearance — passed restrictive voting laws, many of which disproportionately affected nonwhite voters.” Levitsky and Ziblatt concluded that the decision “makes plain a simple fact: many of America’s venerated political institutions are not very democratic; indeed, they were not made for democracy.”
On the sixtieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, many people have called for Congress to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (JLVRAA), which would restore the VRA’s preclearance requirement and expand federal review to include voter roll purges, restrictive voter ID laws, and polling place closures. A palpable sense of urgency surrounds the bill at a time when ballot access is being restricted by state legislatures — including Texas’s brazen gerrymandering scheme — with explicit backing from the federal government.
But so far, the JLVRAA hasn’t been able to escape the Constitution’s legislative meat grinder, and there’s no reason to think that new attempts will be different. The bill died in committee in 2015 and 2017, and in 2019, the Republican-controlled Senate refused to hold a vote or even allow a floor debate. Thanks to the unchangeable one-state, two-senator rule — a flagrant denial of equal suffrage built into the Constitution — the Senate majority that blocked the bill represented seven million fewer voters than the minority that backed it. And with a conservative Supreme Court majority all but guaranteed for a few decades, any federal expansion of voting rights that passed Congress would be challenged by judicial review.
Lewis died in 2020 with the VRA still in shambles. In 2021, the JLVRAA passed the House but was filibustered in the Senate after failing to receive sixty votes in favor. It was blocked again in 2022 after an attempt to change the Senate rules was stopped by just two dissenting Democrats. Polls at the time showed that 63 percent of Americans supported the bill, and “solid majorities” were in favor of expanded access to early and mail-in voting, greater access to same-day registration, and limits on gerrymandering. But the Senate continues to stop all of that from happening.
The rolling back of the Voting Rights Act has itself been enabled by the absence of equal suffrage hard-wired into the Constitution. The Senate — which impacts the allocation of Electoral College votes and confirms positions to the Supreme Court, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, and the Federal Election Commission — is the clearest culprit. Today’s Republican majority of fifty-three senators represents about twenty-four million fewer people than the Democratic minority of forty-five.
Things are only getting worse: by 2040, 70 percent of Americans will live in just fifteen states, represented by only thirty senators. This system of representation — based on geography rather than population — disproportionately affects nonwhite people, most of whom reside in just ten states. And thanks to Article V, which says that every state must agree to changing the system of geographic representation, this denial of equal suffrage is effectively impregnable so long as we play by the Constitution’s rules.
The activists who gathered with President Johnson as he signed the VRA were committed to the fight for universal and equal rights. None were more so than the democratic socialist King, who, as his stances on anti-imperialism and economic justice developed, concluded that the civil rights movement had “left the realm of constitutional rights” and entered “the area of human rights,” in which “the voice of the Constitution is not clear.” King was killed soon after; he never had the chance to develop a fuller constitutional critique. But sixty years since Bloody Sunday and the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the obstacle we face is clearer than ever.
Today the struggle for universal and equal rights requires fighting for a democratic constitution and the political framework in which the goals that King, Lewis, and hundreds of thousands of others fought for can finally be realized.
Great Job Luke Pickrell & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
