I’m not much in the mood to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, given the tremendous efforts being mounted to stunt the law’s effectiveness and, frankly, turn back progress.
Instead, I think we need to remember.
Remember the reasons the act was needed in the first place — nearly 100 years after a war and a constitutional amendment to assure black people the right to vote.
Remember the bitter fight the act faced in the South, where black disenfranchisement was still routine in 1965, and in Washington, where political spines had to be stiffened and yanked into compliance by both the Civil Rights movement and President Lyndon Johnson.
And remember how terribly recent all of that was — not just in our collective cultural histories, but in literal, temporal juxtaposition to today.
I was born just five years after the act passed. Which means nearly all of my forebears, including my own father, faced the brutal and subtle indignities of literacy tests, the beatdowns, the dismissive turning away of any effort toward suffrage.
The act’s biggest problem now, indeed, is the effort to make us forget. The opposition to the law is framed by those who want to mark a supposed distance of our lives today from the awful history of voter suppression and denial.
Low numbers of black voters? No problem — that’s about motivation, not historical racism. Still-low numbers of African-American public officials, even in many majority-black jurisdictions in the South? That’s not justification to keep “punishing” southern states with prophylactic measures to prevent back-sliding on voter access.
It’s not just insulting, but dangerously seductive. Too many Americans thirst for the ideal of superficial equality or make-believe colorblindness, and the opposition to the act has become sophisticated in dangling those false promises.
For instance, Chief Justice John Roberts, who authored the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in the case that invalidated the part of the act that held southern states to higher standards when they alter voting districts or rules, is a proponent of the idea that if we just stop talking about race, stop marking where it cleaves American life, maybe we can just get to a place of equality.
His ruling in Shelby, the voting rights case, goes even further to court a bizarre myth-making that aspires to a South whose present is somehow detached from its history.
Roberts famously asked during oral arguments whether Mississippi or Massachusetts had more of its black population registered to vote — as if the answer, Massachusetts, proved Mississippi and other southern states were being perniciously singled out by the law.
But his question, and his later reasoning in the ruling, seek to strip the south of its distinctive historical patterns — not just that they embraced and fought for slavery, but also that they spent the next century constructing a legal infrastructure to resist even de jure equality.
De facto segregation is what persists in the states, north and south, in the present. But the legal enforcement of inequality, against all efforts to stop it, singularly marks the South’s trek from reconstruction through the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
And it’s not just history.
Look, for instance, at the life of my father, who was born in Natchez, Miss., in 1933.
He went on to serve in the Air Force during the Korean war, but returned to a Natchez, in the early 1950s, where he was still unable to vote. That wouldn’t change until he was in his mid-30s, and headed north to Michigan. That’s a common story for black southern veterans, by the way — the call to serve followed by the refusal of voting rights.
Meanwhile, Natchez itself has struggled since the act’s passage to make it matter much. Even though 54% of the voting-age population in the city is African American, blacks, for instance, don’t hold a majority of the seats on the board of aldermen. That’s because the line-drawing exercises around redistricting seek to pack black voters into a small number of wards, assuring their overall minority status in a city where they are the majority.
(Natchez’s efforts to “pack” black voters in actually triggered a voting-rights inquiry and slap-down from the Department of Justice in 2011, just two years before Roberts wrote that southern states were being unfairly singled out by the law for discriinatory practices.)
Natchez’s black majority has also produced just one African-American mayor since reconstruction.
Turnout, of course, is the issue. White voters show up; blacks don’t.
But only the most demurring and detached analysis could dissociate that dynamic from the vestiges of history, or the present tensions in that community.
You can only believe in this so-called parity by forgetting.
Fifty years after the act passed, I can think of no more egregious dishonor to indulge.
Stephen Henderson is editorial page editor for the Detroit Free Press. He is the host of “Detroit Today,” weekdays at 9 a.m. on WDET-FM (101.9) and “American Black Journal,” which airs at 12:30 p.m. Sundays on Detroit Public Television. Follow Henderson on Twitter @ShendersonFreep, or contact him at 313-222-6659 or email@example.com.