Fifty years ago, on Aug. 6, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, legislation he would later identify as the most important of his political career.
President Lyndon B. Johnson meets with Martin Luther King, Jr. at the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Courtesy of Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum. Image Serial Number: A1030-17a.
The bill was born from the bloodshed five months earlier, when 600 peaceful black protesters marching for the right to vote attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. As they started to cross, state troopers descended upon them with tear gas and clubs, hitting men and women alike. Broadcast throughout the country on the network evening news, the images stirred the conscience of the nation.
Signing the Voting Rights Act fulfilled Johnson’s vision from his Senate days to enfranchise blacks in the Deep South. In the opening sentence of his speech to the nation, Johnson made clear that politics in the South would never be the same: “Today is a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield.“
This was not hyperbole. The promise of the 15th Amendment—the freedom to vote regardless of race, color or previous condition of servitude—had been denied to blacks in the South since the end of the Civil War. In many ways the Voting Rights Act was the last battle of that horrible conflict.
The VRA had one central objective: ending the barriers to voting for millions of blacks. The act accomplished this by banning literacy tests, providing federal voting registrars, criminalizing the harassment of black voters, and, in targeted Deep South jurisdictions, requiring federal “preclearance” of any change in election rules—such as polling locations or hours, and, most important, newly drawn districts.
By every measure, within a decade or so the VRA accomplished its purpose. Millions of disenfranchised blacks registered to vote and began voting in numbers comparable with whites. Our nation should rightly celebrate this monumental accomplishment.
But, sadly, like other landmark legislation from the 1960s, the Voting Rights Act has evolved into a very different statute in ways that its framers could have hardly imagined. What began as a shield to protect minority voters from racist officials has become a sword to further the electoral prospects of Democrats and Republicans through racial, partisan gerrymandering.
Why did this happen? There are many reasons, but three have been instrumental.
The first, beginning in the 1980s, was the development of powerful computer software that combined geographic mapping with U.S. Census and other political data. A computer could display the racial and ethnic makeup of any voting precinct and show how it voted in dozens of previous elections. This allowed politicians to draw new voting districts with finer detail. They could string together small blocks of land where voters fit the desired profile to draw complicated, winding districts that fit partisan purposes.
The second development was the accelerating growth of suburbs. Previously, it was relatively straightforward to draw districts where a majority of the voters were black to guarantee black representation. But then blacks in the likes of Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Charlotte and Richmond began to move out of urban areas and into multiracial suburban neighborhoods. Since the VRA essentially barred any majority-minority districts from being “cracked,” or subsumed into surrounding white districts, the cartographers had no choice: To keep the dispersed black population within the same voting boundaries, they were forced to draw bug-splat-shaped districts that divided multiracial neighborhoods.
Most important, legal developments since the VRA’s passage have made this once-simple law into something increasingly muddled and contradictory. Congressional amendments caused other minority groups, such as Hispanics and Asians, to fall within federal oversight, thus extending the preclearance requirements to places like New York City and even townships in New Hampshire.
The Supreme Court’s VRA jurisprudence moved away from protecting the voting rights of individuals, and instead began promoting “fair representation” of racial and ethnic groups. This had the effect of protecting minority incumbents and expanded the federal preclearance provision to virtually all election procedures and practices. (Fortunately, in 2013, the Supreme Court essentially struck down this unnecessary preclearance provision in Shelby County v. Holder).
These three developments transformed the Voting Rights Act into a tool for engineering election outcomes in which minority voters elect minority candidates in proportion to their percentage of the population, free from the hassle of forming multiracial coalitions.
“I firmly believe that I, as an African-American legislator, can understand and empathize with the issues my constituents confront on a profound level, since I share the same racial and cultural background as they do,” Rep. Corrine Brown said in July after a court ruled that Florida’s congressional districts were illegal gerrymanders and must be redrawn.
This has proved to be a recipe for polarized, racial politics. Today Democrats employ the VRA to challenge common-sense voter-ID laws and centuries-old systems in cities and counties where officials are elected at large instead of by specific geographic districts. Republicans use it to pack minorities into ultrasafe, majority-minority Democratic districts, thus making the surrounding areas more Republican.
This is an unfortunate evolution that causes endless amounts of litigation. This is precisely what Justice Clarence Thomas was criticizing when he wrote for the majority Holder v. Hall (1994) that the court had “converted the Act into a device for regulating, rationing, and apportioning political power among racial and ethnic groups.”
So today as the nation fittingly commemorates the original accomplishments of the VRA, let us not forget how, over time, some great laws can develop into very bad ones.
Mr. Blum, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is the president of the Project on Fair Representation.
