60th Anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 had a long circuitous passage before the United States Congress passed and President Lyndon Johnson signed it into law. Voting rights, expressly enfranchisement and disenfranchisement of diverse groups, have been a moral as well as a disputative political challenge throughout United States history. Because of their status in a white male dominated society, the right of the franchise was elusive for both African Americans and women. America began its democratic experiment in the late 1700s when its governmental leaders granted the right to vote to a limited subset of society - white male landowners. Until the ratification of the United State Constitution, the young nation was governed under the Articles of Confederation that made the newly formed nation of states act more like independent sovereign countries. It promptly became apparent to some of the young nation’s leaders that future stability required a stronger, more centralized government. The drafting of the Constitution of the United States began on May 25, 1787, when the Constitutional Convention met for the first time with a quorum at the Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall) in Philadelphia, to revise the Articles of Confederation. It ended on September 17, 1787, when the Frame of Government drafted by the convention's delegates to replace the Articles was adopted and signed. The ratification process for the Constitution began that day, and ended when the final state, Rhode Island, ratified it on May 29, 1790. A year before the ratification of the U. S. Constitution in September 1789, the First U. S. Congress proposed to state legislatures twelve amendments to the Constitution. Articles 3 through 12, ratified December 15, 1791, by three-fourths of the state legislatures and constitutes the first ten amendments of the Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights. Article 2 concerning “varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives” was ratified in May 1992 as the 27^th Amendment. The first amendment that concerned the number of constituents for each Representative was never ratified. African Americans and women were not allowed to participate in the governance of what became the United States of America.

 The issue of Women’s Rights emerged during the American Revolution, when Abigail Adams warned her husband, John Adams (2nd U.S. president and founding father), not to adopt the repressive code of common law, or the ladies were “bound to foment a rebellion.” In some colonies women voted, but all women lost the right to vote with each state constitution drafted between 1777 and 1807. Like women, African American men were generally denied the right of the ballot. The denial of the franchise to African Americans and women was also evident in Tennessee’s Constitution.

 In 1796, Tennessee’s constitution granted the franchise to all free men who met property and residency requirements, as well as the right to and bear arms. Although this provision applied to a small number of free men of African descent, the state’s 1835 Constitution no longer used the ownership of property as a requirement for white voters. In its place a poll tax was instituted that voters paid for and provided a source of revenue for the state. From the state’s African American perspective, one of the most devastating aspects of the state’s 1835 Constitution was it left enslavement as a part of its body politic and overturned their right to bear arms and stripped away their right of the franchise. It took 35 years before African American men regained their right to vote.

After the Civil War ended in 1865 and the war-torn country entered the Reconstruction era, it took five years before the passage and ratification of an amendment to the U. S. Constitution granting African American male the right to vote. Tennessee, however, preceded the newly reunited nation in granting African American male the right of the franchise. The first state to return to the Union, in May 1866 the Tennessee General Assembly passed legislation giving African Americans the right to make contracts, to inherit property, to sue, and to hold equal benefits and protections under the laws. Yet, the right to vote remained elusive. However, two unrelated events aligned and instigated critical transformations.

Sampson Keeble, the Rev. Nelson G. Merry, Samuel and Peter Lowery, among others, organized the second State Colored Men’s Convention, which met in Nashville in August 1866. They held daily marching protests at the Capitol in their quest to gain passage of a voting rights law aimed at giving African American men the right to vote. Governor William G. Brownlow took office in 1865. Brownlow understood that he could only maintain political power if he held Confederate sympathizers at bay and that enfranchised African Americans could increase his voter base. Consequently, he pressed the legislative branch to introduce and pass a bill granting African American men the right to vote. In March 1867, the state’s legislative branch passed a bill giving African American men the right to vote and to hold political office. Tennessee’s law granting African American men the right to vote, preceded the passage of the 15^th Amendment to the United States Constitution that granted African American men the right to vote nationally by three years. By the time the 15th Amendment arrived in the state for ratification, legislators were in the process of trying to negate the new voting law giving African American men the vote. Consequently, they refused to ratify the 15^th Amendment. After 127 years, on April 2, 1997, Tennessee finally ratified the 15th Amendment, the last of the original thirty-seven states in the Union that had not committed an act of support.

Notwithstanding, the need for an amendment granting African American men the right to vote was the infamous 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford Supreme Court decision that upheld enslavement and their status as non-citizens. On March 6 of that year, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney rendered the Court’s majority opinion that enslaved people were not American citizens and, consequently could not expect any protection from the federal government or the courts. The Court’s opinion further stated that Congress had no authority to end enslavement from federal territory. The Reconstruction Amendments ended that status of African Americans. The 13th Amendment ended the institution of enslavement; the 14th Amendment made African Americans citizens overturning the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision; and the 15th Amendment gave African American men the right of the franchise. It took another 50 years for women to gain the right to vote and Tennessee played the significant role in women gaining the right to vote.

As Reconstruction ended, the United States Supreme Court again used its long-reaching judicial arm to end the rights gained by African Americans, with its 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. This decision issued on May 18, 1896, upheld state-imposed Jim Crow laws that became the legal basis for racial segregation in the United States for the next fifty years. For African Americans, this ruling impacted every aspect of their lives, including the right to vote.

From the Reconstruction era until the 20^th century push for civil rights, Jim Crow laws such as literacy tests, poll taxes, state and local discriminatory practices, and other means of denying the right to vote to African American citizens, over time the federal role in elections increased through three U. S. Supreme Court cases until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. They included the 1876 case of United States v. Reese; the 1915 case of Guinn v. United States; and the 1944 case of Smith v. Allwright. 

The United States v. Reese, the first voting rights case since the passage of the 15^th Amendment, was when Kentucky election officials refused to allow William Garner, an African American, to cast his ballot. This action violated the 1870 Enforcement Act. The Supreme Court held that the relevant sections of the Enforcement Act were unconstitutional because the act was not sufficiently designed to enforce the 15th Amendment. The ruling in this case resulted in significant repercussions for voting rights. The ruling emboldened Southern states to enact discriminatory practices such as literacy test, poll taxes, grandfather clauses and other nefarious and reprehensible voting rules to circumvent African Americans from casting their ballots.

The Guinn v. United States case, decided in June 1915, held that Oklahoma’s literacy test exempted individuals and their descendants who cast a ballot on January 1, 1866, prior to the passage of the 15^th Amendment. The first case in which the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) filed a brief, striking down the "grandfather clause" in Oklahoma's Voter Registration Act of 1910 because the clause discriminated against African Americans and, therefore, violated the 15th Amendment. The statute required voters to pass a reading test. However, the law exempted all those entitled to vote on January 1, 1866, just after the Civil War ended (and before the approval in 1870 of the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed voting rights for all male citizens, regardless of race, as well as their descendants. In 1866 those whose “grandfathers” voted; the law allowed their descendants to register to vote without passing a literacy test. In 1915 the U.S. government prosecuted the officials for criminal conspiracy to deny voting rights to Oklahoma’s African American voting population. Justice Edward White struck down the grandfather clause, writing that the act “is based purely on a period before the enactment of the 15^th Amendment and makes that period the controlling and dominant test of the right of suffrage.”  Founded on February 12, 1909, the Guinn case helped launch the NAACP into civil rights eminence. The Civil Rights organization fought two other voting rights cases. In 1927 the Nixon v. Herndon case struck down the Texas Democratic that prohibited African Americans from voting in the Texas Democratic Party primary and the 1932 Nixon v. Condon case that passed another variation to maintain the white primary system. Dr. Lawrence A. Nixon, an African American physician, brought both cases before the court with the assistance of the NAACP. The last case that focused on voting rights prior to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was the 1944 Smith v. Allwright case out of the state of Texas.

The Texas Democratic Party prohibited African Americans from voting in its primaries, and the state of Texas argued that this was allowable because the state was not acting. The Supreme Court contended that the party’s white-only primaries violated the 14th and 15th Amendments. Litigated by Thurgood Marshall (future Supreme Court Justice), who argued that the Texas Democratic Primary permitted whites to structurally dominate the politics of the one-party South. The United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiff. The Smith v. Allwright case overturned the Supreme Court’s 1935 Grovey v. Townsend case that permitted white-only primaries on the basis that private, voluntary organizations ran the organizations. However, the nation’s highest court held in Smith that Texas entrusted its authority to the state Democratic Party and consequently, the unconstitutional racial bias was, by extension, state action. The end to the white-only primary provided a building block for African American political power in the South. With the onset of the Modern Civil Rights Movement that began with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that desegregated public primary and secondary public schools, the efforts to desegregate American society across the nation, moved beyond litigation and the court system to direct action protest and the United States Congress.

Beginning in 1960 students conducted sit-ins across the South. The Student Movement across the South; the 1963 March on Washington; the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963; and voting rights protests across the South led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. One year prior to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Congress on January 23, 1964, ratified the Constitution’s 24th Amendment, which abolished and prohibited the federal and state governments from imposing poll taxes on voters during federal elections.

African Americans in the South faced tremendous obstacles to voting, including poll taxes, literacy tests, and other bureaucratic restrictions to deny them the right to vote. They also risked harassment, intimidation, economic reprisals, and physical violence when they tried to register or vote. As a result, African American voter registration was limited, along with political power.

In 1964 numerous peaceful demonstrations organized by Civil Rights leaders and the malevolent violence that accosted them brought renewed attention to the obstruction of voting rights, especially in the South. Following the 1964 elections, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) urged the federal government to take action to protect the voting rights of racial minorities. The struggle to obtain voting rights was beset with violence and even death by those wanting to keep the vote from African Americans and maintain the racial status quo.

Their Alabama protests, especially in Selma, met the force of the police who sadistically fought African American voter registration efforts. SNCC’s James Forman of SNCC said: "Our strategy, as usual, was to force the U.S. government to intervene in case there were arrests—and if they did not intervene, that inaction would once again prove the government was not on our side and thus intensify the development of a mass consciousness among blacks. Our slogan for this drive was ‘One Man, One Vote’.”

The murders of Mississippi voting-rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner on June 21, 1964, by local members of the Klan and the attack by white state troopers on peaceful marchers in Selma, Alabama, gained national attention and persuaded President Johnson and Congress to initiate a meaningful and effective national voting rights legislation. The combination of public revulsion to the violence and Johnson's political skills, the long circuitous journey to African Americans gaining the right of the franchise ended when Congress passed the voting rights bill on August 5, 1965.

Since 2013, the Voting Rights Act came under assault when the U. S. Supreme Court made its ruling in the Shelby County v. Holder, which on June 25, 2013, the U.S. Supreme issued its devastating decision when it struck down the law’s formula for determining which states and localities should be required to get federal approval for changes to voting policies to ensure that they were not racially discriminatory. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has also come under attack. In 2021 Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee made it more difficult to mount successful Section 2 challenges against discriminatory voting rules. However, in June 2023, the Supreme Court in a 5-4 opinion upheld the lower court’s finding that Alabama illegally diluted the electoral power of African American voters and forcefully rejected the state’s attempt to strike down or scale back the law. The Court decidedly reaffirmed the legal framework that has guided Section 2 cases for 40 years.

Amendments passed by Congress in the 19^th and 20^th centuries granted African American men, the right of the franchise through the 15^th Amendment; in 1920 women gained the right to vote through the 19^th Amendment; the 24^th Amendment eliminated the poll tax in 1964; and in 1971, the 26^th Amendment granted the right to vote to those 18 years of age.