It is fitting that, as attention is focusing on the 50th anniversary of the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, we should have a conversation about the current state of the voting rights that those marchers and others fought and died for.
Last week, at the National Press Club, Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Push Coalition convened a meeting to discuss just that. [A video of the proceedings is available here and here.] Of course, many advocates discuss—and rail about—the state of voting rights all the time. But this particular discussion, against the backdrop of the Selma to Montgomery March, brought the subject into sharper focus than usual. I was privileged to be one of the participants on a panel kicking off that discussion. We started all the way back with the 15th Amendment, through the Reconstruction period, the civil rights movement, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Shelby County decision of 2013, and (the elephant in the room—with no reference to a particular political party) what we can do about it.
There was, as there usually is, some dissonance between the inside-the-Beltway folks and the grassroots that can be summed up, as Rev. Jackson does in his inimitable way: “what we want versus what we can get.” We Washington types need to hear that sometimes. We certainly don’t want to start the negotiating with our fallback position. But in this case, little negotiating was going on. After the Supreme Court issued its decision in Shelby County v. Holder, the civil rights community wanted to fill the gaping hole left in the Voting Rights Act and fix it fast. But we were not in the driver’s seat, to say the least. Republican stalwart Rep. James Sensenbrenner and our usual Democratic allies in Congress told us what we could get, and it was thought more important to get that much than to hold out for the perfect fix.
Maybe now that we’ve been told in no uncertain terms that even that imperfect bill, the Voting Rights Amendment Act, will not be allowed to progress in the current Congress, we should feel liberated to think about what it is that we want. There is nothing that prevents the bill we want to be introduced without regard to whether we can get it passed. In fact, there are valid reasons to do so, including educating the public and policy makers about what is at stake.
The preclearance process eviscerated by the Supreme Court should be replaced by an up to date procedure, to be sure. However, what we want is that any proposal should take account of the fact that a state’s win-loss record in voting rights litigation is not the only measure of its good faith in complying with the federal law. A case that settles or ends in a consent decree, depending on the terms of the settlement or consent decree, can be just as revealing about the state’s compliance history. And a state’s strict voter identification law, if it is found to be discriminatory in intent or effect, should “count” as much as any other discriminatory voting law when evaluating that state’s voting rights record. In other words, whether a state is subject to preclearance in the future should be based on a comprehensive evaluation of that state’s adherence to the voting laws—not just some voting laws—in the recent past.
So what does Shelby County have to do with Selma? As Rev. Jackson put it, and again he was characteristically pithy, “Selma is in the rearview mirror; Shelby is in the windshield.” In our zeal to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Selma, let’s not forget that another part of Alabama, one much more wealthy and white, sued successfully to undo what we had won, by blood and sacrifice, on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Let’s not forget what has happened, in Alabama and elsewhere, “beyond the bridge”—another Jackson gem.
History rarely progresses in a straight line, and the history of civil rights in this country is no exception. The backward look we took on the panel at the Press Club made that clear. The post-Civil War constitutional amendments and Reconstruction electoral gains lost their salience when the federal troops left the south and the Ku Klux Klan rode in. By 1910, almost every registered black voter in the south had been disenfranchised by one device or another—from violence and threats of violence to poll taxes and literacy tests. In more recent years, the states have produced a plethora of new laws that can turn back voting rights for minorities as surely as any poll tax ever did. Aside from the federal courts, which are the usual bulwark against denials of constitutional rights, preclearance has been our most powerful remedy against voting rights violations–in the places where they most often occur. We no longer have that remedy, and the consequences have already been obvious and profound.
Commemorating the victories is important to any political movement. Such celebrations foster communality and re-energize us so that we can rededicate ourselves and continue our efforts. The commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery March on March 6th and 7th will undoubtedly be an exhilarating series of events, and nothing should detract from the celebratory feelings of all those who gather there. But there is still a lot of work to do, and nothing should distract us from our need to do it. Remedying Shelby is in our windshield, and we must proceed.