Civil rights stalwarts, politicians and academics held a requiem for the Voting Rights Act on its 61st anniversary last week, lamenting the neutering of a law that had propelled African Americans – especially in the South – into choosing their own leaders without fear of violence, murder or lesser polling place obstacles.
Activists didn’t call it a “funeral.” Yet no one underplayed the latest reversal of progress for Blacks, Latinos and other people of color in this nation’s long, tortured and oft-racist history.
The hollowing out of the Voting Rights Act reveals again how too many white Americans abhor notions of equality with Black Americans, and the steps they will take to hinder equitable Black and Latino representation in Congress and at the state and local levels.
President Lyndon Johnson signed the legislation on Aug. 6, 1965, several months after Alabama state troopers pummeled peaceful marchers on “Bloody Sunday.” Rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 and earlier this year, though, have gutted one of the landmark achievements of the civil rights era.
The former decision ended federal preclearance that state and local governments – mostly in the South – had needed before changing voting procedures. (A 2023 analysis found that at least 29 states had passed 94 restrictive voting laws in the decade following that decision.)
The latter Supreme Court decision said Louisiana’s congressional map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander – thus making it difficult to create a second majority-minority district in the U.S. House of Representatives.
“As a direct result” of Chief Justice John Roberts’ court’s “decades-long quest to undermine the right to vote, our nation is experiencing a modern-day political Jim Crow where too many Republicans act with impunity to dilute the voting power of Black and Latino communities across the country,” said Eric Holder, a former U.S. attorney general and chair of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee.
U.S. Rep. Jennifer McClellan, D-Richmond, led passage of a Virginia Voting Rights Act in 2021 while in the state Senate. It created new protections against voter discrimination based on race, color or language. It made the commonwealth an outlier across the South when providing equal access at the polls.
Virginians should feel confident about enfranchisement, McClellan told me in an interview. “But I’m fighting at the national level so that everybody’s right is protected,” she said.
However, McClellan noted of the federal law: “It’s on life support.”
That’s much too optimistic.
Henry Chambers Jr., law professor at the University of Richmond, told me the violence that was once commonplace against African Americans before the VRA became law is basically non-existent today.
State legislatures, though, can often draw districts that negate the will of voters – and keep people of color wondering whether their votes have any meaning.
“It’s possible you get people who say voting is pointless,” Chambers added. “The clearer it becomes people of color will be ignored,” the more likely they might stop heading to the polls.
That’s exactly what conservatives – including today’s Republican Party – would love to see.
Other factors include voter identification requirements and felon disenfranchisement, issues that tend to affect African Americans and Latinos moreso than whites. Virginia has been one of the toughest states for freed felons to regain civil rights. It could finally change that process – born in racism during the 1901-02 Virginia constitutional convention – through a referendum this fall.
Chambers said that If more nonwhites voted for Republicans, voter suppression tactics would decrease. Blacks and Latinos, however, usually select Democratic candidates overwhelmingly because of the party’s agenda and its embrace of their concerns.
Still, the professor added: “Blacks have historically been treated differently by the government.”
When African Americans advance in the United States, too often there’s a virulent white backlash – and not just regarding voting. It seems as if the majority wants to dehumanize people of color just to prove a point: You will never be equal.
Examples are painfully easy to cite.
Abraham Lincoln, the “Great Emancipator,” didn’t even want freed slaves to remain in the country. I guess Lincoln saw no use for Black Americans after they weren’t working for free any more.
Before the Civil War, he discussed plans to export Black people to Liberia. After the war’s start in 1861, the year he became president, Lincoln explored options to extradite freedmen to Panama and an island near Haiti.
Then in August 1862, he invited five Black men to the White House – not including Frederick Douglass, the most prominent abolitionist of the day – to urge an exodus.
“But for your race among us there could not be war,” Lincoln said, “although many men engaged on either side do not care for you one way or another,” according to David W. Blight in “Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom.”
Victim-blaming at its absolute worst. Black activists and abolitionists excoriated the idea, and it never gained much traction.
The war’s end led to Reconstruction, the period from 1865 to 1877 that saw African-Americans gain political and economic clout. The reaction to the Black empowerment was swift, violent and merciless:
Jim Crow. Lynchings. Black codes. Second-class citizenship in education, employment, housing and human decency. Verdicts in criminal cases, including the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, that blessed white killers.
Where violence wasn’t an issue, African Americans still got the shaft. Among the most notable was the passage of a GI Bill toward the end of World War II that, in practice, denied mortgages to Black veterans. Urban Renewal projects, time and time again, destroyed Black communities for a perceived “greater good” for cities.
President Donald Trump now has the gall to continue advocating for a nearly $1.8 billion, taxpayer-backed slush fund to “comfort” his supporters – including those who attacked the U.S. Capitol while trying to overthrow the 2020 presidential election.
Meanwhile, the few surviving victims of the racist siege of Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921 – which killed as many as 300 Black people – never were able to collect reparations in court. The Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed their lawsuit in 2024.
With the weakening of the VRA, people of color will keep fighting for voting rights and fair representation. They fear regression.
The regret is that, in this country, it’s always been this way.
