Honoring the Voting Rights Act: Our work is much from over

The next visitor publish was written for Day by day Kos by Bryan Honest, interim president and CEO of the Southern Poverty Legislation Heart.

Ten years earlier than passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, a younger Black lawyer returned to his residence state of Alabama after graduating regulation college. His mission, as he usually says, was to “tear down segregation everywhere” he discovered it. He was 23 years outdated.

His identify shouldn’t be extensively recognized, however it must be. Fred Grey is a civil rights large. I first got here throughout his story after I moved to Tuscaloosa to work as a regulation professor on the College of Alabama. My new residence was the birthplace of the Civil Rights Motion, and to immerse myself in its historical past, I learn case after case from that period. Mr. Grey had filed almost each one.

Our democracy right this moment is at an analogous inflection level as that confronted by civil rights activists within the Nineteen Fifties and ‘60s. A lot of those that have a seat within the halls of energy are hell-bent on denying Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities a voice in shaping our future. Like then, this second requires brave resistance by multiracial coalitions. 

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After I look again at historical past, what strikes me about Mr. Grey and his contemporaries is how progress has lengthy been pushed by decided younger individuals. Mr. Grey’s first consumer in 1955 was Claudette Colvin, a 15-year-old who refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery bus. After Rosa Parks made her personal refusal 9 months later at age 42, Mr. Grey additionally took up her case and went on to turn out to be the authorized thoughts behind the Montgomery Bus Boycott. He labored alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who was simply 26 on the time.

The persistence of these younger organizers — and legions of others preventing for freedom within the Deep South and throughout the nation — finally resulted in passage of a sequence of civil rights legal guidelines that modified historical past. Probably the most transformative was the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In Mississippi, for instance, solely 6.7 % of eligible Black individuals had been registered to vote in 1965. Inside two years after its passage, that quantity elevated to just about 60 %. By 1972, greater than 1 million new Black voters had been registered throughout the South, and the hole between white and Black voter registration within the area dropped from an estimated 44 % to 11 %.

Regardless of its efficacy — and its reauthorization 5 occasions by broad bipartisan majorities in Congress — the VRA was severely weakened by a 2013 Supreme Court docket choice, Shelby County v. Holder, and its protections have been additional eroded by subsequent assaults. With out the VRA’s protect, states have been capable of cross greater than 100 anti-voter legal guidelines. These modifications make it simpler to purge voter rolls, shutter polling locations, and create onerous ID necessities. Final yr, Alabama even enacted a regulation criminalizing individuals for serving to their mates, household, and neighbors solid a poll.

Furthermore, some elected officers are peddling lies about our election system and making an attempt to override the desire of the individuals with their very own extremist agenda. The cumulative results of these ways is voters feeling powerless, disillusioned, and even petrified of elevating their voices. Such methods are harking back to these deployed 60 years in the past to silence and subjugate Black individuals, notably within the Deep South. However because the younger foot troopers earlier than us knew, what we’re preventing for is much extra highly effective than these moments of defeat. In coalition, we are able to, and can, transfer the nation ever nearer to a multiracial, inclusive democracy. 

It’s time for a brand new Voting Rights Act — one which meets the challenges and alternatives of the twenty first century. We’d like a contemporary invoice that prohibits simple-minded and complicated voter suppression units. It’s time for all of us to rally behind the younger leaders in our communities and our statehouses who’re on the entrance strains of the battle for a greater democracy. I’ve the good honor of witnessing the tenacity and imaginative and prescient of this new technology of leaders day-after-day. My regulation college students are hungry for justice. They’re keen to check the teachings of historical past and use the regulation as a instrument to make sure everybody has an equal voice and vote in our democracy. 

As we commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act this week, we should heed the phrases of Mr. Grey, who stated, “Let’s not assume for one moment that our work is done; the struggle for equal justice continues.” On the shoulders of the giants who risked the whole lot for the proper to vote, we march on.