Ep. 26: The Assault on Voting Rights

So I guess we can dive right into a little bit of history of the Voting Rights Act.

So to set the scene of why the Voting Rights Act was necessary, we know that after the Civil War, the right to vote was expanded to all men, regardless of their race or past servitude, like obviously all male citizens of the United States.

And that was with the 15th Amendment passed in 1870.

However, as many of you may know, that wasn't really the case for a very long time because different pieces of legislation in the South especially were passed to systematically strip people of color and African Americans of the right to vote through like on the surface racially blind people.

legislation but things that actually indirectly targeted and disenfranchised black voters such as grandfather clauses which was basically saying that you can only vote if your grandpa was registered to vote which like i guess is racially neutral except for the fact that like Obviously,

African-Americans couldn't vote two generations ago.

Yeah, yeah,

yeah.

So things like that or poll taxes, literacy tests, things that like would systematically discriminate against people that perhaps are less economically advantaged or have had less education.

Literally a century after, it finally came to a T that this was something that needed to be remedied.

And that was something that was fought in the civil rights movement by leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis.

which culminated in 1965 in Lyndon B. Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act, which was an act banning discriminatory voting practices that were being utilized to disenfranchise Black voters in the South.

It was a reaction to a lot of bubbling tension from the years preceding, including the murder of voting rights activists in Mississippi, as well as the violent suppression of a peaceful march in Selma, Alabama, for voting rights.

And it also came on the tail of the Civil Rights Act and other pieces of civil rights legislation.

So this is a very, very important piece of legislation that had immediate effects.

You can see that by the end of 1965, a quarter of a million new black voters had been registered.

And since this act and amendments and additions that have been added to strengthen it, we've seen a massive increase in African American members of Congress since its passage, as well as African Americans just in all levels of government.

And so you can see that this act was very influential in kind of breaking through the racial disenfranchisement that had existed since the end of the Civil War.

Yeah, this act is also explicitly responsible for protecting about a sixth of the majority African American districts in the United States.

So it's been significant, not just in setting the framework for their production, and obviously also for allowing Black citizens to actually go out and vote, which the 15th Amendment provisioned, but then did not actually support.

But it's also like still explicitly responsible for protection of a sixth of So it's like 70 of 430 districts.

So that's a very significant group that we could see losing to compromises on this act.

And I think the other really significant thing about the Voting Rights Act is that it, in a sense, set a precedent for acknowledging that intent of the law is not enough to guarantee what the law will actually do.

That even though the 15th Amendment was intended, at least in the direct wording to to increase voter franchisement and to finally bring African-American people into the sphere of true citizenship and try to make them more equal with white citizens in the United States, that the wording alone was not enough.

And as a result, it wasn't implemented.