Anyone who pays attention to the issue must be well aware that Republicans in multiple state legislatures have introduced a large number of bills to make voting more difficult. Even without the clarion voice of the nation’s leading voting activist, who happens to be Black, we should also know that this Republican paroxysm of power grabbing is straight up racist.
We know this for several reasons. As “conservatives” are fond of pointing out, in a vivid display of the adage that a little knowledge is dangerous, the Democratic Party as the Party of slavery and secession, and Republicans, radical Republicans, wrote and ensured adoption of the Amendments to the Constitution that ended slavery and at least tried to ensure a measure of equality for the freed slaves and their descendants. But well informed people know that, by the early 1960s, the two Parties had entirely switched positions, with Democrat Lyndon Johnson leading the way to passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act (VRA), the key statute that concerns us now.
Republicans squealed that the VRA was a huge increase in federal involvement in election administration, which the Constitution originally left mostly to the states. But the Fifteenth Amendment, one of the three Amendments the radical Republicans demanded and won in the wake of the Civil War, flatly prohibits discrimination in voting by any political unit in the United States on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” and expressly gave Congress “the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” The VRA had its effects. It allowed the registration of thousands of Black voters, mostly in the South, but throughout the country. It is not an exaggeration to say that virtually every Black elected official from the former Confederacy, and presidents Clinton and Obama, owe their elections to the effects of the VRA.
Republicans in the South honored this remarkably effective piece of public policy by attacking it. Officials in Shelby County, Alabama, filed suit to enjoin enforcement of two key sections of the Act. Section Four prohibits any test or device for voter registration that had the purpose or effect of discriminating on the basis of race, and applied to jurisdictions where less than half of the population had voted in the 1964 presidential election. Section five required “preclearance” from the Department of Justice for any changes to voting procedures in covered jurisdictions to ensure that they did not adopt new practices that would discriminate on the basis of race.
The majority opinion, holding those two sections to violate the Constitution, by Chief Racist John Roberts, pointed to the evidence that the VRA had largely achieved its purposes, whether measured by African American voter registration or by African American elected officials. What he failed to consider was the bloody minded persistence of his fellow " white supremacists.” More dispassionate observers could and did easily predict that several, if not all, of the states of the former Confederacy almost immediately took advantage of the decision invalidating provisions of the VRA to adopt various changes to their voting procedures that would have violated the act and that clearly had the effect of limiting African American voting. Republicans being nothing if not clever in the sense of cynical, they have found various mechanisms that look neutral on their faces, but clearly have the effect of targeting African American voters, the most loyal constituency of the Democratic Party.
The VRA was still relevant then and it is still relevant now. There is a bill in Congress to restore it. We should all demand every member of Congress support it.
Numerous historians have LBJ on the record referring to the Civil Rights Act of 1957 as “the n*gger bill,” a phrase that runs counter to altruism on civil rights.
"These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference." LBJ after signing the civil rights act.