VOTING RIGHTS ACT OF 1965

VOTING RIGHTS ACT OF 1965 (VRA) abolished a set of tactics that had prevented most African Americans in the South from voting since the beginning of the twentieth century. The VRA also established a variety of oversight mechanisms that gave the law the teeth absent from the CIVIL RIGHTS ACTS passed in 1957, 1960, and 1964. The provisions included the preclearance of any changes in state and local election laws with the federal government (section 5), authorization of federal "registrars" who would make sure that blacks were being allowed to register (sections 6 and 7), and provision for federal observers who would oversee elections (section 8).

By 1964, 43.3 percent of voting-age blacks in the South were registered to vote, up from only 3 percent in 1940. However, in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina, black registration was only 22.5 percent. Continued resistance in these states, along with the violence against peaceful voting rights demonstrators in Selma, Alabama, early in 1965, galvanized national public opinion in favor of the VRA.

President Lyndon Johnson signed the VRA into law on 6 August 1965. The positive effects were immediate and substantial; within two years, black registration in Mississippi increased from 6.7 percent to 59.8 percent, and in Alabama it went from 19.3 percent to 51.6 percent. The impact on black officeholders was even more dramatic. Only seventy-two blacks served in elective office in the South in 1965. By 1985 there were 143 blacks in state houses (10.8 percent of the total), 33 in state senates (7.8 percent), 425 on county councils (5.9 percent), and 1,330 on city councils (5.6 percent).

Many states actively resisted the growing influence of black voters. Initial legal challenges to the constitutionality of the VRA were rejected by the Supreme Court in South Carolina v. Katzenbach (1966). Other tactics were more invidious. Racial gerrymanders, at-large elections, prohibition of "single-shot" voting in multimember districts, majority runoff provisions, and impediments to voter registration were used widely throughout the South. In a landmark ruling in Allen v. Board of Election (1969), the Supreme Court gave the Justice Department the ability to challenge these practices under the section 5 pre-clearance provision of the VRA. Ruling that the right to vote encompassed the entire electoral process, not simply the acts of registering or casting a ballot, the Court significantly expanded the reach of the VRA. In 1975, section 4 was expanded to include language minorities in Texas, Alaska, Arizona, and parts of several other states.

The most important of the VRA amendments, passed in 1982, extended key provisions of the law for twenty-five years and overturned City of Mobile v. Bolden (1980). The Bolden case had required that plaintiffs demonstrate the intent to discriminate rather than discriminatory effects, which made it almost impossible to prove a vote dilution claim. The 1982 VRA amendments restored the pre-Bolden standard of proof by amending section 2 to prohibit any voting procedure that results in protected classes having "less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice." This amendment was the impetus behind the racial redistricting of the early 1990s, which was subsequently challenged in a series of court cases, starting with Shaw v. Reno (1993). While this area of the law is in flux, the VRA has remained the single most important contribution to minority voting rights in U.S. history. The VRA is up for renewal in 2007. The outcome of that legislative process will determine the direction of voting rights for the next generation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Davidson, Chandler, and Bernard Grofman, eds. The Quiet Revolution in the South: The Impact of the Voting Rights Act, 1965–1990. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Grofman, Bernard, Lisa Handley, and Richard G. Niemi. Minority Representation and the Quest for Voting Equality. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Kousser, J. Morgan. Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

David Canon

See also Civil Rights Movement; Discrimination: Race; Disfranchisement.