Civil rights legislation sparked powerful backlash that’s still shaping American politics | https://urnow.richmond.edu/
Civil rights legislation sparked powerful backlash that’s still shaping American politics | https://urnow.richmond.edu/
Civil rights legislation sparked powerful backlash that’s still shaping American politics
For nearly 60 years, conservatives have been trying to gut the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement. As a scholar of American voting rights, I believe their long game is finally bearing fruit.
The 2013 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder seemed to be the death knell for the Voting Rights Act.
In that case, the court struck down a portion of the Voting Rights Act that supervised elections in areas with a history of disenfranchisement.
The Supreme Court is currently considering a case, Merrill v. Milligan, that might gut what remains of the act after Shelby.
Conservative legal strategists want the court to say that Alabama – where African Americans make up approximately one-quarter of the population, still live in concentrated and segregated communities and yet have only one majority-Black voting district out of seven state districts – should not consider race when drawing district boundaries.
These challenges to minority voting rights didn’t emerge overnight. The Shelby and Merrill cases are the culmination of a decadeslong conservative legal strategy designed to roll back the political gains of the civil rights movement itself.
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