Voting Rights Act

As we celebrate the 59th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) this month, it is important we remember this: The only way to tackle the complex challenges of our time is with a democracy that is responsive to the people it represents.

Last week’s Supreme Court ruling on Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act stunned many people in Black and brown communities.

The lead plaintiff in an Alabama voting rights case before the United States Supreme Court visited Boston last week to raise funds and cultivate allies for a statewide coalition of activists working to promote Black civic engagement in the southern state.

Two years after false claims of voter fraud fueled the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, those same lies are shaping restrictive voter laws in a slew of states nationwide, explains Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the Voting Rights Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. And they are targeting primarily voters of color.

Fifty-six years ago, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law one of the most important pieces of legislation in American history: the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This law took a number of important steps to empower citizens that had long faced de facto and de jure barriers to the ballot box. It repealed blatantly racist policies, like literacy tests, and provided the federal government the tools it needed to stamp out segregationist electoral policies wherever they were introduced.

All eyes have been on Georgia’s blatant effort to shove the state permanently back in the red-state column with its unabashed Jim Crow-style vote-suppression ploy. But this is just the warmup for the GOP’s main act, to once and for all erase from the books the 1965 Voting Rights Act.