The Fifty Year Battle For Voting Rights

Democratic Rep. John Lewis of Georgia has fought for the rights of voters for five decades.  Sometime in the next couple of weeks, the Supreme Court is expected to decide that his signature legislation, the Voting Rights Act, is no longer necessary because, ironically, the efforts to get black voters to the polls in 2012 was so amazingly successful.

The successful resistance to voter suppression may be the most important story of the 2012 election. Compared with 2008, 1.7 million more blacks, 1.4 million more Hispanics and 550,000 more Asians went to the polls, versus 2 million fewer whites. The turnout rate among black voters exceeded that of whites for the first time on record, according to the Census Bureau. While the turnout rate fell among nearly every demographic group, the largest increase came from blacks 65 and over. Those, like Lewis, who had lived through the days when merely trying to register could get you killed were the people most determined to defend their rights last year.

Yet Lewis viewed Obama’s re-election as only a temporary victory, given the challenge to Section 5 before the Supreme Court. The mood in Selma during this year’s anniversary of Bloody Sunday was more somber than celebratory. “Here we are, forty-eight years after all you did, and we’re still fighting?” Biden said in Selma. “In 2011, ‘12 and ‘13? We were able to beat back most of those attempts in the election of 2012, but that doesn’t mean it’s over.” After Holder cited the continued importance of Section 5 in combating discrimination, the crowd at the foot of the bridge chanted, in what had to be a first, “Section 5! Section 5!”

“When it comes to voting rights,” says Ben Jealous, president of the NAACP, “you realize the past isn’t the past.”

And with Section 5 gone, southern states will be able to gerrymander black and Latino voters into a handful of districts and crush voting everywhere else.  The Voting Rights Act will effectively be gutted in a time when it's needed more than ever.

 

Indeed, despite powerful moments of reconciliation, the South is far from a post-racial utopia. Six of the nine states fully covered by Section 5, all in the South, passed new voting restrictions after the 2010 election. “Section 5,” write law professors Christopher Elmendorf and Douglas Spencer, “is remarkably well tailored to the geography of anti-black prejudice.” Of the ten states where anti-black stereotypes are most common, based on data from the National Annenberg Election Survey, six in the South are subject to Section 5. Racially polarized voting and “explicit anti-black attitudes,” according to an AP survey, have increased since 2008. Arkansas and Virginia have passed strict new voter-ID laws this year, while North Carolina is considering a slew of draconian restrictions.

“Places like Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, they forget recent history,” Lewis said. “We’re not talking about something that took place a hundred years ago, but a few short years ago. And some of it is still going on today. And if you get rid of Section 5 of the VRA, many of these places, whether it be state, county or town, will slip back into the habits of the past.” 

We'll find out in a few weeks.  We could find out as soon as Monday.  Without the VRA Section 5, these states will immediately move to disenfranchise millions of voters.

We voted in record number in 2012.  Now we have to be punished so that never happens again.