WHO KILLED THE U.S. VOTING RIGHTS ACT—AND WHY?

By Sasha Alex Lessin, Ph.D. (Anthropology, UCLA)

1865–1965 Backstory: A CENTURY OF STRUGGLE FOR THE RIGHT OF BLACK AMERICANS TO VOTE

THE CIVIL WAR ENDED SLAVERY, BUT NOT WHITE DOMINATION

The Union’s victory in 1865 destroyed the Confederacy and enabled the abolition of slavery throughout the United States through the 13th Constitutional Amendment.

Eleven states had seceded and formed the Confederacy: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Four other slaveholding states—Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri—remained in the Union. Slavery persisted in some territories and other jurisdictions until federal abolition.

Reconstruction governments gradually restored their congressional representation. Tennessee regained representation in 1866; the other former Confederate states followed between 1868 and 1870.

The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, established national citizenship and equal protection under the law. The 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, prohibited federal and state governments from denying voting rights because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. For the first time, large numbers of formerly enslaved Black men voted, helped write new state constitutions, served in legislatures, and participated in governing the South. Black women remained excluded from voting under the same sex-based restrictions that applied to American women until the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920.

The 15th Amendment had promised Black men voting rights, but white supremacists organized to destroy their ability to exercise those rights.

1865–1877: WHITE SUPREMACISTS ATTACKED BLACK VOTERS AND RECONSTRUCTION GOVERNMENTS

Former Confederate leaders, their supporters, and terrorist organizations sought to restore control over Southern politics, land, and labor. White supremacists, including the Ku Klux Klansmen, attacked Black voters, teachers, ministers, officeholders, and white Republicans who supported Reconstruction. The supremacists murdered political organizers, burned schools and churches, assaulted families, threatened employers and tenants, and brutalized communities preparing to vote. Federal troops, federal prosecutors, and Reconstruction governments sometimes suppressed this violence. Congress passed Enforcement Acts in 1870 and 1871 to defend voting rights and combat organized intimidation. But resistance continued. The Compromise of 1877 ended federal military support for the remaining Republican Reconstruction governments in the South. As white Democratic governments regained control, they dismantled many Reconstruction reforms and increasingly excluded Black citizens from political power.

1877–1965: SOUTHERN GOVERNMENTS USED TERROR, SEGREGATION, AND ECONOMIC COERCION TO SUPPRESS BLACK VOTERS

Southern white supremacists developed an interlocking system of racial domination.

They used lynching, mob violence, beatings, threats, and political assassinations to intimidate Black citizens.

They imposed poll taxes, which prevented impoverished citizens from voting unless they could pay.

They administered literacy tests and constitutional interpretation tests selectively, allowing many white applicants to register while rejecting Black applicants.

They created grandfather clauses, exempting many white voters from requirements imposed on Black voters.

They manipulated registration offices, voting rolls, primary elections, and district boundaries to exclude Black political participation.

They enforced racial segregation in schools, transportation, housing, restaurants, hospitals, and other public institutions.

They used vagrancy laws, discriminatory policing, fines, convict leasing, and forced prison labor to control Black workers. Some people convicted under these systems were compelled to labor under brutal conditions.

Landowners and employers threatened eviction, dismissal, debt collection, and denial of credit against Black citizens who registered or attempted to vote.

Discriminatory educational systems denied Black children resources available to white children, and then voting officials used unequal education as a pretext to reject Black applicants.

The system varied across states and decades, but its central purpose was consistent: to preserve white political supremacy by restricting Black political, educational, and economic independence.

DIXIE SEGREGATIONIST DOMINATORS, INCULCATED IN ANUNNAKI DOMINATION OF ENLIL-YAHWEH, DEMANDED WHITE POLITICAL CONTROL

White segregationists declared: We intend to keep control of our state. Washington has no right to tell us who can vote, where our children attend school, or how we run our communities.
We will use every power the law gives us to preserve our way of life. These matters belong to the states, not Washington.

BLACKS, EMBODYING THE WISDOM OF  THE GREAT ANUNNAKI GODDESS OF CRETE, REPLIED

“You call it your way of life, but you built it on our exclusion. Our people work your fields, pay taxes, raise families, build churches, teach children, and serve this country. Yet you threaten us when we register to vote. We demand equal schools, fair wages, protection from violence, and the right to elect officials who answer to us. The Constitution belongs to us, too. A state cannot claim freedom for itself while denying freedom to its citizens.

1955–1965: BLACK AMERICANS ORGANIZED A MASS MOVEMENT FOR VOTING RIGHTS

Black Americans had resisted disenfranchisement for generations through lawsuits, petitions, churches, schools, newspapers, labor organizations, and local political campaigns. During the modern Civil Rights Movement, activists intensified their organizing. The NAACP challenged discriminatory laws in court. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, associated with Martin Luther King Jr., organized nonviolent campaigns. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organized voter registration drives and helped establish local movements, particularly in Mississippi and Alabama. The Congress of Racial Equality organized direct-action campaigns against segregation. Black women, including Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Amelia Boynton Robinson, and Diane Nash, provided indispensable leadership. During Freedom Summer in 1964, volunteers and local organizers challenged Mississippi’s systematic exclusion of Black voters. The murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner exposed the dangers activists faced. In Selma, Alabama, organizers confronted voter-registration discrimination. On March 7, 1965, Alabama state troopers and local law-enforcement officers attacked peaceful marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The violence became known as Bloody Sunday. Television coverage showed Americans the brutality used against citizens seeking constitutional rights. Eight days later, President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed Congress and called for federal voting-rights legislation. He declared: “We shall overcome.” Civil-rights organizers continued their campaign. The Selma-to-Montgomery march later that month dramatized their demand for federal protection.

AUGUST 6, 1965: PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON SIGNED THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT INTO LAW

The 89th United States Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, formally Public Law 89-110, and President Johnson signed it on August 6, 1965. Congress enacted the law to enforce the 15th Amendment’s prohibition against racial discrimination in voting. The 15th attacked the mechanisms that had prevented Black Americans and other racial minorities from exercising their constitutional rights.  SECTION 2 — PROHIBITED RACIAL DISCRIMINATION IN VOTING, prohibited voting qualifications, practices, and procedures that denied or abridged voting rights on account of race or color. Congress later strengthened Section 2 in 1982 and set a results-based standard for certain discrimination claims. Section 4 designated specific jurisdictions that needed Federal oversight and set a coverage formula identifying jurisdictions with histories of discriminatory voting tests and low voter registration or turnout. Section 5 also required preclearance: Federal approval before covered jurisdictions changed voting rules. Covered states and localities had to obtain approval from the United States Department of Justice or the federal district court in Washington, D.C., before implementing changes to their voting laws or procedures. They had to demonstrate that the proposed changes did not have a discriminatory purpose or effect. This system was called preclearance; it prevented covered jurisdictions from implementing discriminatory changes first and forcing affected voters to challenge them afterward.

THE ACT SUSPENDED DISCRIMINATORY VOTING TESTS AND AUTHORIZED FEDERAL EXAMINERS. Federal officials could help register eligible voters in jurisdictions where discriminatory practices had obstructed registration. Citizenship, age, residency, and other eligibility requirements remained, and voting restrictions affecting people with felony convictions continued in many states. Nevertheless, the Act dramatically expanded Black Americans’ practical ability to exercise voting rights the Constitution had promised nearly a century earlier.

1965–1970: BLACK VOTER REGISTRATION ROSE DRAMATICALLY

The Voting Rights Act produced substantial changes in Southern voter registration.

In Mississippi, where intimidation and discriminatory registration procedures had excluded most Black adults from the electorate, Black voter registration rose from approximately 6.7% in 1964 to 59.8% in 1967.

Across the South, federal enforcement helped remove registration barriers, expand participation, and strengthen Black political organizing.

Black citizens increasingly won elections to school boards, city councils, county offices, state legislatures, and Congress.

The Act did not eliminate racial inequality, political intimidation, or discriminatory election practices. But it gave the federal government stronger tools to challenge them.

It also helped transform Southern politics by expanding the electorate and enabling Black communities to exercise greater influence over public institutions.

2006: CONGRESS OVERWHELMINGLY RENEWED THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT

Four decades after its enactment, Congress examined evidence that voting discrimination continued.

The House voted 390–33 to renew major protections.

The Senate voted 98–0.

Republican President George W. Bush signed the renewal on July 27, 2006.

Congress extended the special federal oversight provisions for another 25 years.

Lawmakers from both major parties concluded that the protections remained necessary.

Yet in 2013, five Supreme Court justices invalidated the formula that made preclearance operative.

That decision began the next chapter of our investigation:

WHO WEAKENED THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT—AND WHY?

In 2006, a Republican president and overwhelming majorities of both parties in Congress agreed that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 remained necessary. But in 2013 and 2026, Supreme Court majorities composed entirely of Republican-appointed justices restricted two of its central protections.