The 1965 Voting Rights Act was the crowning achievement of the Civil Rights Movement. It stripped away the Jim Crow-era laws in the South that had, for nine decades, nearly eliminated any chance for Black Americans to cast a vote or hold elective office.
Certainly, it can be argued that conditions in the Southern states have radically changed since 1965. Discrimination by race is far more rare. Yet, in politics, the more things have changed, the more they have stayed the same.
The South has historically been a one-party region. After the Civil War, in reaction to Republican Abraham Lincoln’s elimination of slavery, it was segregationist Democrats who dominated in the states of the defeated Confederacy. Then, the civil rights victories of the 1960s provoked a swing away from the increasingly liberal Democratic Party and, as a result, the dominant Southern party became the GOP.
No matter the era or the party brand, however, it has always been the same political class clinging to power — white conservatives. The Voting Rights Act diminished that power by imposing congressional district maps that more fairly represented voters of all races, but the Supreme Court has now given all the power back to the conservative white establishment by ruling that redistricting plans that purposely create Black majority districts are an unconstitutional violation of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.
The court majority’s argument is that race cannot be the driving factor in determining the composition of a congressional district. The fallacy in that reasoning is that the justices, in other rulings, have said they have no authority to interfere with state legislatures that gerrymander to give an advantage to one party or the other.
So, now, thanks to the court, Republican-controlled legislatures, particularly in the Southern states, will gerrymander away districts where African Americans — who heavily favor Democrats — have had representation. Indirectly but effectively, they will disenfranchise people based on race, but in a manner approved by the Supreme Court.
Jim Crow rises again.
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