Fifty years ago this week, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law. The act was widely viewed as the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement and sought to provide unfettered access to the ballot box for minority voters. Today, poll taxes and literacy tests are a distant memory. But many states are attempting to roll back voting rights through restrictive voter ID laws and other measures that disproportionately affect black and Hispanic voters. The efforts follow a 2013 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that nullified large provisions of the Voting Rights Act affecting several states with a history of discriminatory practices, including Florida and the Tampa Bay area. The justices were wrong, and the need for strong voting rights protections remains.
Support for the Voting Rights Act grew while blacks were engaged in fierce battles for civil rights that included bus boycotts, sit-ins and marches. Their peaceful protests often were met with violence. In the summer of 1964, for example, three voting rights activists were killed by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi. In March 1965, state troopers in Alabama attacked voting rights supporters as they headed across Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge. That day would be known as Bloody Sunday, an event broadcast on television that provided undeniable evidence of the cruelty endured by many blacks in the South.
Congress enacted the Voting Rights Act on Aug. 5, 1965. Johnson signed it into law the next day. It included protections against discrimination on the basis of race or primary language. It also allowed for the assignment of federal examiners to ensure that the law was being upheld and required areas with a history of discrimination to have efforts to change election procedures approved by a U.S. District Court or the Department of Justice. Nine states and parts of six others, including Florida, were subject to that part of the law. Five Florida counties, including Hillsborough, were subject to pre-clearance by the federal government.
The Supreme Court justified its 5-4 decision to roll back the pre-clearance provision in 2013 by declaring that the Voting Rights Act had worked as designed, given that blacks have voted in increasingly larger numbers since the law's passage. The court's analysis was off base and shortsighted, as evidenced after the ruling by states from Texas to North Carolina that have rushed to erect roadblocks to voting that are decidedly based on race.
In Florida, Gov. Rick Scott led an effort in 2011 to decrease the number of early voting days. Because of pre-clearance laws then in effect, the move was scrutinized by the Justice Department. The Scott administration was allowed to proceed only after agreeing to lengthen polling place hours. Although the Legislature later restored the longer early voting period, imagine what would have happened had the Supreme Court already weakened the law. Now the Legislature is preparing to redraw congressional maps again this week without Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which would have required the Justice Department to sign off before the districts took effect.
North Carolina also provides fresh evidence of the need for strong voting rights oversight. Last week, a federal court upheld a state law that repealed several voting rights measures, including same-day registration and extended early voting. On Wednesday, a federal appeals court panel ruled a voter identification law in Texas discriminated against black and Hispanic voters.
Fifty years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the tactics to deny voting rights have become more subtle. But they still exist, and the end game is still the same. Congress should restore the teeth to the Voting Rights Act. It is an injustice to commemorate the law and relegate its necessity to history.