Last week was the fortieth anniversary of the
Voting Rights Act. This was one of
the most significant pieces of civil rights
legislation in American history. It
finally made it possible for African-Americans to exercise their right to vote
in the South. The act did what a constitutional amendment could not.
Following the Civil War, co-called Radical Republicans in Congress attempted
to extend to former slaves the same rights that whites enjoyed. This included
vigorous lobbying for ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, which
extended the right to vote to black men. But for
nearly the next 100 years, the
amendment had little effect on the South. Most African-Americans found it all
but impossible to vote.
In 1871 Mrs. Harriet Hernandes, an African-American resident of Spartanburg,
South Carolina was called to testify before the Joint Congressional Select
Committee, which was investigating the condition
of blacks in the South. During
her testimony, Mrs. Hernandes revealed that she had been pistol-whipped and
beaten by members of the Ku Klux Klan. When a
Congressman asked her why she had
been beaten, she replied that it was because her husband had voted in a recent
election. A Klansmen told her, "You can tell your husband that when we see him
we are going to kill him". He voted the radical
ticket. When another Congressman
asked her how many other wives in her
neighborhood had been beaten she replied,
"It is all of them, mighty near."
Almost a century later, little had changed in the South. In the early 1960s,
barely a quarter of African-Americans were
registered to vote. In 1964, various
civil rights and religious organizations
undertook a massive voter registration
drive in the South known as Freedom Summer. By
the end of the summer, 15 civil
rights volunteers had been murdered and only
1,600 blacks had been registered to
vote.
The following year, during a voter registration march in Marion, Alabama, a
black marcher was killed by the local sheriffís
deputies. Only a few days later,
at another march in Selma, Alabama the Ku Klux Klan, in league with the
sheriffís department, attacked the activists, killing a white woman who was
attempting to protect her fellow black marchers. This devastating violence
finally prompted Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act.
This legislation banned the literacy tests Southern states used to prevent
blacks from registering to vote. More importantly, it placed the registration
and voting process under the authority of the federal government. It required
the government to send examiners into any county in which less than 50 percent
of African-Americans were registered to vote, and actively register local
residents. In doing so, the federal government
made it possible for millions of
blacks to register and vote for the first time.
By the early 1970s, the proportion of blacks who were registered to vote in
Selma, Alabama had risen from two percent to 60 percent. In Mississippi, the
number of blacks registered to vote rose from
22,000 to 300,000 during the same
time period. Nationally, 20 percent of all
African-Americans were registered in
1960, 39 percent in 1964, and 62 percent in 1971. In 1965, there were only 72
elected black officials in the South. By 1980,
there were over 3,000, including
the mayors of Atlanta and Birmingham.
Considering what the Voting Rights Act of 1965
accomplished, itís disturbing to
learn that President Bushís nominee to the
Supreme Court, Judge John G. Roberts,
opposed it in 1981 while serving as an assistant to Attorney General William
French Smith in the Reagan administration.
Congress was set to renew the act the
following year. Congress was also discussing the
act in light of a 1980 Supreme
Court ruling that stipulated that a violation of
the act had to be intentional,
and not merely having the effect of
disenfranchising voters. Congress wanted to
remedy this interpretation of the act by passing a law that would also deem
non-intentional voter discrimination as unlawful.
Based on documents recently released by the National Archives, Mr. Roberts
regarded the Voting Rights Act and Congressional
efforts to strengthen it as ìa
radical experiment, according to one memo he wrote. In other memos he advised
the Reagan administration to oppose Congressí
effort to make voting regulations
illegal if they were unintentionally discriminatory. He argued that if the
government was forced to support voters who were discriminated against, albeit
unintentionally, this would ìprovide a basis for
the most intrusive interference
by federal courts into state and local
processes. Itís troubling that a future
Appellate Court judge and nominee to the Supreme Court would regard the
governmentís efforts to ensure that all citizens have a right to vote, and to
have their vote counted, as ìintrusive interference.
Judge Roberts will have an opportunity to testify before the Senate Judiciary
Committee next month. He should clearly and fully articulate his views on the
Voting Rights Act. Unless he admits that his previous positions were poorly
reasoned, his nomination to the Supreme Court should be rejected.
Gene C. Gerard taught history, religion, and ethics for 14 years at several
colleges in the Southwest, and is a contributing
author to the forthcoming book
Americans at War, by Greenwood Press.
