Good News: Key Provisions of the Voting Rights Act Extended Twenty-Five Years
Apparently this happened on July 27, 2006 and I spaced on it, but in case you had too, the news is in and the news is good. After prolonged hemming and hawing the President and Congress have extended provisions in the Voting Rights Act that were set to expire.
Let us not confuse the very important provisions of the Voting Rights Act with the more basic and unassailable constitutional right to vote. There is a chain email that circulates every six months that breathlessly warns black people that their right to vote is about to be revoked because the Voting Rights Act is set to expire. The mail is feverishly forwarded far and wide exhorting its readers IN ALL CAPS that they must contact their Congressional representative and urge him or her to support black citizens’ continued access to the ballot. Fear not, it is the Fifteenth Amendment, not the Voting Rights Act, that gives black men the constitutional right to vote. The Nineteenth Amendment confers that right on all women. As Amendments, the right to vote for black men and women will not expire.
Quite frankly, (picture me wagging my finger now) if we had a better grasp on our very recent history, emails like this one would never have legs because we would all remember that the Voting Rights Act, passed in the wake of the Selma-to-Montgomery March in 1965 was about removing barriers to minority enfranchisement. That was the point of Mississippi Freedom Summer and all of the voter registration protests. The right to vote had been conferred on black men in the wake of the Civil War, yet one hundred years later very few blacks were able to vote because of intimidation and other repressive tactics.
We have all heard the stories about white registrars who would make potential black registrants read a passage in Chinese or guess how many bubbles are in a bar of soap in order to register to vote. I have been reading about illiterate black workers in South Carolina who memorized the entire Constitution in order to pass the voter registration tests. Poll taxes and violence were also potent weapons used to deter black voters. The purpose of the Voting Rights Act is to put an end to these and other voter-suppression shenanigans, securing the constitutional rights of all eligible voters.
According to the legislation, some provisions of the Act sunset, or expire, after a period of time. This recent renewal extended expiring provisions of the Act over another twenty-five years. Check out the article on the LDF’s website here.
Hip hip hooray for more good news. With the debacle unfolding in Ohio, we must celebrate where we can.
Let us not confuse the very important provisions of the Voting Rights Act with the more basic and unassailable constitutional right to vote. There is a chain email that circulates every six months that breathlessly warns black people that their right to vote is about to be revoked because the Voting Rights Act is set to expire. The mail is feverishly forwarded far and wide exhorting its readers IN ALL CAPS that they must contact their Congressional representative and urge him or her to support black citizens’ continued access to the ballot. Fear not, it is the Fifteenth Amendment, not the Voting Rights Act, that gives black men the constitutional right to vote. The Nineteenth Amendment confers that right on all women. As Amendments, the right to vote for black men and women will not expire.
Quite frankly, (picture me wagging my finger now) if we had a better grasp on our very recent history, emails like this one would never have legs because we would all remember that the Voting Rights Act, passed in the wake of the Selma-to-Montgomery March in 1965 was about removing barriers to minority enfranchisement. That was the point of Mississippi Freedom Summer and all of the voter registration protests. The right to vote had been conferred on black men in the wake of the Civil War, yet one hundred years later very few blacks were able to vote because of intimidation and other repressive tactics.
We have all heard the stories about white registrars who would make potential black registrants read a passage in Chinese or guess how many bubbles are in a bar of soap in order to register to vote. I have been reading about illiterate black workers in South Carolina who memorized the entire Constitution in order to pass the voter registration tests. Poll taxes and violence were also potent weapons used to deter black voters. The purpose of the Voting Rights Act is to put an end to these and other voter-suppression shenanigans, securing the constitutional rights of all eligible voters.
According to the legislation, some provisions of the Act sunset, or expire, after a period of time. This recent renewal extended expiring provisions of the Act over another twenty-five years. Check out the article on the LDF’s website here.
Hip hip hooray for more good news. With the debacle unfolding in Ohio, we must celebrate where we can.
posted by YG&B | 4:40 PM
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