01 August 2005
Americans Celebrate 40th Anniversary of Voting Rights Act
The Voting Rights Act in historical perspective
The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.
-- President Lyndon Baines Johnson, August 6, 1965
Introduction
In 1961, the civil rights activist John Lewis was beaten by a southern mob for using a white restroom. Lewis was participating in a "Freedom Ride" challenging the racial segregation of interstate buses and bus terminals. Twenty-five years later, the citizens of Georgia's Fifth District elected Lewis to represent them in Congress. It is impossible even to imagine this result -- or the success of the 9,000 African-Americans who hold public office today -- without the Voting Rights Act. Today's Americans celebrate the Act's 40th anniversary, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on August 6, 1965. As Attorney General Alberto Gonzales explained in a speech marking this anniversary: "The Voting Rights Act has been enormously successful, but our work is never complete. For this reason, this Administration looks forward to working with Congress on the reauthorization of this important legislation."
Historical Background
Overview: Who Votes?
Historically, the practice of choosing leaders or resolving disputed issues at the ballot box has prevailed in many societies but never more so than today with the spread of democratic institutions to nations on every continent. One crucial question in each case is simply -- Who votes? In ancient Athens and the Roman Republic citizenship was mostly hereditary and the right to vote linked to property ownership. In Great Britain, the 19th Century Reform Bills gradually extended the ballot to working class men, although universal male suffrage (all male citizens of prescribed age entitled to vote) did not arrive until 1918 and full voting rights for women a decade later.
After launching its revolutionary drive for independence on the cry "No taxation without representation!" the United States was comparatively swift in extending the franchise to white males. Over time, a number of states afforded women the vote, and the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1920, extended this right nationally. The formal and informal measures employed in much of the country to deprive African-Americans of the vote remained the greatest blight on American participatory democracy. As with legal segregation, voting rights was entwined with "states' rights," the decentralized federal system under which many functions other countries accomplish on the national level are in America handled by the fifty states. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) represents the American people's willingness to defeat this tradition of state prerogative by wielding federal power to ensure the political empowerment of black Americans.
A Promise Deferred
Article I, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution (1787) empowered the states to set voting qualifications in elections for the U.S. House of Representatives, the only part of the federal government directly elected in that era. As a result, the requirements for casting a ballot varied from state to state. Most considered the vote less a right than a privilege, and at independence imposed a mixture of property and residency (typically two years) requirements. Between 1790 and 1860 these restrictions were loosened, and the electorate expanded to include nearly all adult white males citizens. The State of New Jersey had in 1776 afforded women the vote, but other states did not follow suit. While a handful of northern states briefly permitted otherwise qualified free blacks to vote, by 1860 nearly every state had disenfranchised its African-Americans. In the South, where plantation slavery prevailed, the question of voting was obviously irrelevant.
The 1861--65 Civil War recast fundamentally the legal rights of African-Americans, although the legal promises that followed would in many cases not be fulfilled for another century. Most obviously, the victorious North required the abolition of slavery (Thirteenth Amendment, 1865). Also, after a long and bloody war fought in part to end the enslavement of African-Americans, it was no longer seen as tenable to deny them the right to vote. Many northerners viewed the voting rights as the former slaves' best safeguard against further oppression. The Fifteenth Amendment (1870) accordingly bars the United States "or any State" from denying or abridging any citizen's right to vote "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." For a short time, African-Americans made considerable political progress in the South, casting ballots and electing a fair number of public officials on the federal and state levels.
With the withdrawal of Northern armies from the South in 1877, white Southern elites re-imposed their political dominance. Suppressing the African-American vote was crucial and was achieved by a number of methods. At first, raw violence was the preferred tool. A number of other methods were subsequently introduced, among them:
Poll Taxes: These were special taxes levied equally on every member of a community. Citizens who failed to pay were deemed ineligible to vote. Many Southern states introduced poll taxes between 1889 and 1910. Given the extent of African-American poverty, the poll tax disenfranchised large numbers of black voters, and poor Whites as well. The Twenty-Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (1964) prohibited denying any citizen the right to vote in an election for federal office for failure to pay a poll tax. A Supreme Court decision two years later extended this prohibition to state and local elections.
Literacy Requirements: These conditioned voter registration upon highly subjective oral and written examinations that were nearly always applied with special vigor to African-American applicants. Some states would not even permit an applicant to take the examination unless an already-registered voter would "vouch" for them. Since there were very few African-Americans on the southern voting rolls and few Southern Whites would risk social ostracism or worse to "vouch" for a prospective black voter, it was nearly impossible for many applicants even to take the test. The examination was often blatantly unfair. It might require an applicant to write out a passage from the Constitution as dictated by the County Registrar -- clearly for white applicants, mumbled for blacks. A number of similar tactics were used to prevent black applicants from qualifying. In Alabama, for instance, the decision whether an applicant passed or failed was made in secret, and there was no method for challenging a Board of Registrars that passed as "qualified" all white Applicants and no blacks. Election officials worked to discourage African-Americans from even applying, by publishing their names in local newspapers and calling them to the attention of local White Citizens Councils and Ku Klux Klan chapters, thus subjecting prospective African-American voters to possible economic and physical coercion.
The Times They Are A-Changin'
Several factors propelled the Voting Rights Act forward. One was increasing black political power in the North, where legal segregation had never taken hold and less formal discrimination, while real, was not as politically crippling as the harsher Southern practices. The number of African-Americans in the North had increased greatly during the "Great Migration" of 1910--30, when between 1.5 and 2 million Southern African-Americans moved to the North, typically in search of industrial jobs -- a trend that continued into the post-World War II era. Concentrated in urban hubs, many of these blacks could vote, and they helped focus the attention of northern elected officials on the plight of African-Americans in the South.
Another key was the steely determination of the dedicated civil rights workers who in some instances literally gave their lives for the cause. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, many activists turned their attention to securing voting rights in the South. During the "Freedom Summer" of 1964, groups including the Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Congress of Racial Equality dispatched over 1000 volunteer organizers, both white and black, to help register blacks in Mississippi, a state where African-Americans comprised 45% of the population and only 5% of its registered voters. This was dangerous work. On June 21, three volunteers were murdered (a conviction was finally obtained in 2005). Nine months later, Alabama state and local police attacked with tear gas and billy clubs some 600 civil rights protestors attempting to march from Selma to the state capitol at Montgomery. The televised images of what would be then be known as "Bloody Sunday," March 7, 1965, galvanized public opinion in favor of stronger civil rights measures and hardened President Lyndon B. Johnson's resolve. Working closely with Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen to assure bipartisan support, Johnson and senior Members of Congress crafted the legislation that would become the Voting Rights Act. On August 3, the House of Representatives passed it by an overwhelming 328--74 margin. The Senate followed the next day, by a 79--18 margin.
Shortly before noon on August 6, 1965, President Johnson drove to the U.S. Capitol building. Waiting for him were the leaders of Congress and of the Civil Rights movement, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lewis among them. In signing the Act into law, Johnson told the nation:
The central fact of American civilization... is that freedom and justice and the dignity of man are not just words to us. We believe in them. Under all the growth, and the tumult, and abundance, we believe. And so, as long as some among us are oppressed and we are part of that oppression it must blunt our faith and sap the strength of our high purpose.
Thus this is a victory for the freedom of the American Negro, but it is also a victory for the freedom of the American nation. And every family across this great entire searching land will live stronger in liberty, will live more splendid in expectation and will be prouder to be American because of the act that you have passed that I will sign today.
What The Voting Rights Act Does
The problem was not that African-Americans lacked the legal right to vote -- as we have seen, the Fifteenth Amendment already barred racial discrimination in voting rights -- but rather that some state and local officials had systematically deprived blacks of those rights. The Voting Rights Act accordingly authorized the federal government to assume control of the voter registration process in any state or voting district that in 1964 had employed a literacy or other qualifying test and in which fewer than half of voting age residents had either registered or voted. Six entire southern states were thus "covered," as were a number of counties in several other states. Covered jurisdictions were prohibited from modifying their voting rules and regulations without first affording federal officials the opportunity to review the change for discriminatory intent or effect. Other provisions barred the future use of literacy tests and directed the Attorney General to commence legal action to end the use of poll taxes in state elections.
The introduction of federal "examiners" ended the mass intimidation of potential minority voters. By the end of 1965, the five states of the "Deep South" alone registered 160,000 new African-American voters. By 2000, African-American registration rates trailed that of whites by only 2 percent. In the South, where in 1965 only 2 African-Americans served either in Congress or a state legislature, the number today is 160.
The VRA was originally enacted for a 5-year period but it has been both extended and expanded to introduce new requirements, such as the provision of bilingual election materials. In 1982, President Ronald Reagan signed a 25-year extension of the VRA. "The right to vote is the crown jewel of American liberties," he said, "and we will not see its luster diminished."
Conclusion
Writing in 2005, Representative John Lewis lauded the "tremendous progress since the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965." Forty years ago, he continued, only 7% of eligible black Mississippians were registered to vote. The figure today is 70%, and 71 Members of Congress boast of African American, Latino, Native American, or Asian descent. The VRA, he concluded "has indeed been successful and has revolutionized enfranchisement in America during the past forty years."
(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
