While the Civil War Amendments to the U.S. Constitution both guaranteed African Americans citizenship and protected their right to vote (as did the Civil Rights Acts of 1870 and 1871), the Jim Crow laws that followed Reconstruction placed serious limitations on African American political expression. Nonwhite Americans were not only subject to legal tactics such as literacy tests, poll taxes, “grandfather clauses” (i.e., restrictions on one’s right to vote justified on the grounds that one’s grandfather did not possess that right and the presumption that enfranchisement is somehow a function of ancestry or some other social requirement and not an objective, universal right), and the all-white primary; but they were also victims of a persistent climate of physical and emotional intimidation, and worse still, the deadly terror imposed on African Americans and other minorities through the brutality of lynching. Consequently, African American electoral participation plummeted in the latter nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century.
Confronted by considerable social and political resistance, organizations like the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) were founded near the turn of the century to promote and protect the constitutional rights of African Americans. At the presidential level, both President Theodore Roosevelt (in his 1906 State of the Union address) and President Warren Harding (in a speech delivered in Birmingham, Alabama, in October 1921) sternly condemned the lynching epidemic and began to publicly argue for the protection of African American political rights; and there was some movement by African Americans to press for their rights as guaranteed under the Constitution; but the crises, unprecedented in their scope and gravity, of the Great Depression and World War II delayed and eclipsed the struggle for minority rights. However, by the middle of the twentieth century, white voters outside of the South appeared ready to end the political and social discrimination faced by African Americans. The Republican Party platform in the Campaign of 1944 called for the abolition of the poll tax, and the Democratic Party platform in the Campaign of 1948 contained a civil rights platform that pledged “the right to full and equal political participation.” The Supreme Court struck down the practice of all-white primaries in the 1940s, restrictive covenants in housing in the 1940s, and segregation in law schools and in public schools in the 1950s, and President Dwight Eisenhower used federal troops to enforce school desegregation orders in the South. Outside of the South, there was bipartisan support for the political enfranchisement of black voters. In the Campaign of 1960, both the Democratic and Republican parties supported a constitutional amendment to end poll taxes in federal elections; and the Twenty-Fourth Amendment was ratified in 1964. In Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections in 1966, the Supreme Court found the use of poll taxes in state elections to be unconstitutional as well.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) effectively ended the use of literacy tests in elections. Equally significant, the VRA provided for the appointment of federal registrars in southern states with a history of low rates of African American voter registration. Extensions of the VRA in 1970, 1975, 1982, and 2006 provided for the use of bilingual election materials in areas with sizable non-English-speaking populations, extended federal protections to disabled voters, required that states with a history of voting discrimination obtain federal preclearance for changes in their election laws, and provided for federal election monitors to ensure that voters were not intimidated at the polls on Election Day, a provision that has been used in more recent years to protect other vulnerable groups such as Chinese Americans, Latinos, and Arab Americans. The 1982 extensions of the VRA created majority-minority districts to improve the representation of ethnic minorities in the House of Representatives. The implementation of the VRA has paved the way for millions of African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans to register and vote throughout the nation, and it has also significantly increased the representation of nonwhites in the U.S. Congress. Writer Ari Berman counted upward of three thousand restrictive laws that were thwarted between 1965 and 2013 by the federal courts and the Justice Department under the VRA.
In June 2013, a divided Supreme Court overturned Section 4 of the VRA—the formula used to determine which states (and counties) were subject to the preclearance conditions of Section 5—in the landmark decision Shelby County v. Holder, arguing that the formula was dated and needed to be updated. While the remainder of the VRA was intact, states and counties that were previously required to clear any changes in their election laws (including the drawing of local, state, and federal electoral district lines) with the Department of Justice or the federal courts were now free to alter their laws at will. The effect was swiftly felt: Texas, North Dakota, and North Carolina enacted strict new voter identification laws; Arkansas, Tennessee, and Virginia enacted photo identification requirements; North Carolina and Ohio eliminated their same-day registration; North Carolina eliminated preregistration for sixteen- and seventeen-year olds; Nebraska, Wisconsin, Ohio, and North Carolina reduced their early voting periods; Virginia placed stricter restrictions on third-party voter registration activities; Indiana permitted challengers to demand proof of identification from voters; Ohio made absentee ballot availability subject to funding; and Ohio prohibited individuals who lacked identification or a Social Security number from voting even with a provisional ballot. Changes were also felt at a local level, where most of the VRA’s influence had resided; for example, Georgia moved some of its municipal elections (notably, in counties with significant African American populations) to dates that were not in November, and North Carolina downsized its voting districts, with many of the cuts taking place in districts that served low-income and minority communities. This forced the Department of Justice, joined by various groups committed to the protection of the franchise, to file suit against specific laws limiting access to the ballot. For example, in early August 2015, a federal appeals court struck down a voter identification law enacted by the Texas state legislature.
Congress proposed remedial legislation after the Shelby ruling; however, Republicans, who controlled both chambers after the 2014 midterm, expressed no interest in debating or voting on the proposed legislation (despite overwhelming bipartisan support for the renewal of the VRA as late as 2006, and the support of then-president George W. Bush for the legislation). The Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2015 is yet another attempt to revive the VRA, including a new formula for preclearance, federal approval of state voter identification laws, and prohibition of minority vote suppression. Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) is the Senate sponsor of the bill, and he has been joined by Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK). In the House, Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) is sponsoring the bill. A previous version of the bill had been authored by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI).
See also Civil Rights Issue; Race Relations Issue; Symbolic Racism; Voting Reform Issue
American Civil Liberties Union. “Timeline: Voting Rights Act.” http://www.aclu.org/voting-rights/voting-rights-act-timeline. Accessed September 15, 2015.
Berman, Ari. Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.
Davis, Ronald L. F. “Creating Jim Crow.” The History of Jim Crow. http://www.jimcrowhistory.org/history/creating2.htm.
Flores, Henry. Latinos and the Voting Rights Act: The Search for Racial Purpose. New York: Lexington Books, 2015.
Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives. “Black Americans in Congress: Constitutional Amendments and Major Civil Rights Acts of Congress.” http://baic.house.gov/historical-data/civil-rights-acts-and-amendments.html. Accessed September 15, 2015.