Supreme Court: How the justices revived Jim Crow voter suppression - Vox

Supreme Court: How the justices revived Jim Crow voter suppression - Vox

A podcast

How the Supreme Court revived Jim Crow voter suppression tactics

Carol Anderson explains what happens when our voting rights laws start to crumble.

By Ian Millhiser  Sep 21, 2020, 8:30am EDT

In 1965, the United States began a grand experiment: We decided to finally have free and fair elections.

Before President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the United States was more or less a white ethnostate. As Johnson explained in an address to Congress proposing that law, “every device of which human ingenuity is capable” was used in the South to deny Black people the right to vote.

The Voting Rights Act, and especially a provision of that act requiring states with a history of racism to “preclear” new voting laws with federal officials before those laws could take effect, may be the most effective civil rights law in American history. On the day the Voting Rights Act was signed, only about 5 percent of Black Mississippians were registered to vote.

Two years later, that number was 60 percent.

Yet in decisions like Shelby County v. Holder (2013) and Abbott v. Perez (2018), the Supreme Court dismantled much of this landmark voting rights law.

The first episode of By the People?, a new podcast miniseries that I’m hosting, lays out what happens when the United States abandons its brief commitment to ending race discrimination at the polls. I spoke with Carol Anderson, a professor of African American studies at Emory University and the author of One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy.