The Voting Rights Act

President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 while Martin Luther King and others look on 6 August 1965. Photo by Yoichi Okamoto. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

The US Constitution, from 1789 to the present, puts control over elections at the state level and all of the mechanics of voting – who can vote, where they can vote and how often. This was the basis on which black people in the American South, the former states of the rebellious Confederacy, were disenfranchised from the 1890s until 1965.

The Voting Rights Act in August 1965, was a historic intervention into that state control. It has a set of specific provisions allowing the federal government to intervene and register voters whenever a certain layer of unregistered people is met. It was applied with enormous force from 1965 onwards, in all of those states from Virginia to Texas, and the consequence was that in 1968, for the first time in 100 years, the majority of African Americans could vote.

The civil rights movement

Nowadays, we talk about a long civil rights movement that goes back to the late 1930s. In popular understanding, the civil rights movement begins in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, with the bus boycott led by Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. But this is a long, deep movement, and regaining voting rights was a central part of it. So, from the late 30s until 1965, African Americans, alongside some white allies, have been pushing to challenge the various state laws.

This long campaign reached fruition with the Voting Rights Act, when President Lyndon Johnson, a southern white man, convinced a bipartisan majority – going against his own party, the Democrats of the South – that voting rights simply could not be delayed any longer.

It was revolutionary because, until then, the American South was an apartheid state. It was a racial state in which black people were not citizens. In some of those states, like Mississippi, they had been the majority until 1940. So, overturning racial apartheid and giving full citizenship, however tenuous to African Americans, was indeed a political revolution in those states, from Virginia to Texas.

An extraordinary increase

In 1964, when there were millions and millions of African Americans and substantial numbers voting in the northern states enough to make a difference, there were 100 black elected officials in the entire country: five members of Congress as of 1964 elected here and there, a state legislator or a city councilperson. Now, 56 years later, there are tens of thousands of black elected officials. Fifty-seven members of the House of Representatives, a vice president, senators, governors – in a few cases, it’s hard for white people to vote for a black governor of their state, they have a lot of trouble doing that. So, that is one indication of the extraordinary increase in political efficacy that African Americans achieved because of the Voting Rights Act.

Black power

Before the Voting Rights Act, where black people could vote in the North, they were almost always represented by white politicians. Their votes were sought and they could get a little patronage, but there was an expectation that they would vote for whites – except in overwhelmingly black areas. That explains the few members of Congress from Detroit, Philadelphia, New York and Chicago – these are from completely segregated black neighbourhoods.

Photo by Everett Collection

After 1965, very rapidly, the notion of black power grew and took on force. Black power is widely misunderstood, in my view. It’s seen as a general cultural and social movement. It was originally understood, in the words of Stokely Carmichael, as political power for poor black people. Starting very quickly, black men and women began running for offices they had never run for before. Carl Stokes was elected mayor of Cleveland, a major American city, in 1967. This was front page news in every newspaper. In 1968, Shirley Chisholm was elected to Congress from Brooklyn and it took off from there. In the 70s and 80s, what was most visible was black men and women getting elected mayors of most of America’s major cities. And that’s real political power: control of jobs.

This is not a utopian story; it’s a story in many cases of machine politics, but it marks an enormous difference from black people being considered lucky that they get to vote for white men to black people actually voting for their own to represent them.

A subterranean political life

In the South, from the 1890s well into the post-war period, the most apt term to use is racial terror. There are the 5,000 lynchings, public murders – completely unsanctioned public murders – but for every lynching, there are probably 100 whippings; and for every whipping, there are 500 instances of direct physical intimidation. “Get off the sidewalk”, followed by that word that we do not say anymore. So this is pervasive racial terror.

In the black belt counties that still exist today, where the black folk are 70-80% of the population, not one person voted until 1965. So, black political life in the South is subterranean. It is reading northern newspapers, black newspapers from the North, it is pressing court cases to be allowed to vote in Democratic Party primaries, which had been defined as only for white men, as the Democratic Party is a private club that only white men and then white women could vote in.

So, there’s a certain element of legal advocacy and long distance interest in politics where black people could vote, but otherwise, no. To be clear, there were always a tiny handful of black people who would vote in the South, usually more likely in the small southern cities; a black businessman, doctor or minister would be allowed to vote in a symbolic way, so as to suggest that the reason the rest of them didn’t vote was their own problem.

No absolute right to vote

Voting is controlled at the state level. It is my assertion that there is no absolute right to vote in the US. It cannot be found in the Constitution. The constitutional amendments regarding voting are negative bars. The 15th Amendment says you may not prevent someone from voting on the basis of their race, colour or previous condition of servitude. The 19th Amendment says you cannot prevent someone from voting on the basis of their gender.

There is nothing clearly laid out in those constitutional amendments or in the case law around them that asserts an absolute right to vote. It may be presumed, but it’s not there, and this has left room, since 1789, for states applying a vast array of prohibitions – not the obvious ones only of race or gender, but property holding, taxpaying, nativity, residence. Well into my lifetime, many states had extremely strict residence requirements. You might have to have lived in a state for a year and prove you’d lived there for that time.

Part of what makes this difficult is that we’ve got 50 states, so you have to go state by state and look at the requirements. Certainly, over the past decades, in some ways, it has opened up a lot, but now, one party – the Republican Party – has found a whole set of new ways to disenfranchise people at the state level.

Different forms of disenfranchisement

Voter identification laws require you, as a condition of voting, to produce some form of state approved identification, such as a current driver’s license. These apply even if you’ve been voting for decades. Driver’s license requirements negatively impact poorer, older voters who do not have driver’s licenses, or current driver’s licenses. They knew exactly what they were doing when they did this.

That’s only the most obvious version. A very popular type of voter ID law to disenfranchise voters that Republicans don’t like are saying that student identification cards, even when they’re issued by public universities and have photographs, are not valid forms of voter ID. Texas, if I’m correct, allows you to use a gun license as a valid form of voter identification, but not a voter student identification card issued by the University of Texas.

These laws, which are arcane and very carefully designed, will cut out poor older voters and students, and the poorer, older voters are disproportionately black and brown. So that’s one of the most popular means, but by no means the only form of disenfranchisement that is being practiced now.

The US is not a true democracy

Photo by Ron Adar

On the terms understood in the rest of the world, the US is not a true democracy and never has been. The most basic premise of a functioning electoral democracy is that the majority rules. That is universally understood. The majority does not rule in the US. Our Senate, which is not the House of Lords or the French Senate, is absolutely decisive. You can control the US Senate with maybe as little as 16% of the population, because you get two senators for every state, and there are states with 500.000 voters and other states with tens of millions of voters.

The U.S. Senate, grossly, to an extraordinary level, empowers small states, predominantly white and rural. This is not majority rule. The Republicans controlled the Senate after 2018, even though Democrats had received tens of millions more votes. We have had, in the past 20 years, two presidential elections in which the winner of the popular vote did not become president because of this arcane 18th century institution, the Electoral College, which is grossly unrepresentative of the popular vote. In 2020, Donald Trump came very close to winning again, even though Joe Biden beat him by millions and millions of votes, a huge popular vote majority, relatively speaking. So, between the Electoral College and the extremely unrepresentative character of the Senate, it’s not possible to say that the US is a true democracy.

Discover more about

Equal voting

Gosse, V. (2019, June 12). Are we the new Radical Republicans?. Organizing Upgrade.

Gosse, V. (2014, February 12). Jim Crow Justice–As Usual. Huffington Post.

Equal voting rights in the United States