Julian Zelizer, the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs, has co-edited his latest book, “Our Nation at Risk: Election Integrity as a National Security Issue.” The book, published by NYU Press, showcases the nation’s top political scientists, historians, and legal scholars as they propose solutions for democracy’s future while recounting the country’s past.

“At a time when our election system has shown itself to be so vulnerable — from January 6 through the political violence that culminated with the assassination attempt against former President Trump — a book bringing together the best minds in the country to work through how we can actually fix our democracy is more urgent than ever before,” said Zelizer, a New York Times best-selling author.

In this exclusive excerpt, Zelizer details the long and nuanced history of some of the most important voting rights measures enacted in the United States.

Enjoy 30% off by using the code NYUP30 on nyupress.org.

In March 1965, civil rights leaders traveled to Selma, Alabama, in order to attract national attention for marches that were taking place to build support for a bill. On March 7, hundreds of protesters tried to walk peacefully from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital. The notorious county sheriff, James Clark, stopped them in their tracks. Standing alongside his troops, Clark wore his military-style helmet and dark sunglasses, with a button on his jacket that said “Never,” and greeted the activists when they reached the Edmund Pettus Bridge as his officers violently attacked the peaceful protesters. The chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, John Lewis, had his skull cracked open by police batons. Television cameras captured the horrific images of what was happening. Americans who had been watching ABC’s Sunday-night movie, Judgment at Nuremberg, couldn’t believe the brutality when the network cut away from the film to show images from the clash in Selma. “I don’t see how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam—I don’t see how he can send troops to the Congo—I don’t see how he can send troops to Africa,” Lewis angrily argued, “and can’t send troops to Selma, Alabama.”¹⁸ 

The scenes of state-sanctioned racial violence were so shocking that Democrats in Congress— who had huge liberal majorities after the 1964 election and faced a Republican Party terrified of looking like reactionary extremists after Goldwater’s landslide defeat in 1964—called for an immediate response. President Johnson decided to send a voting rights bill to Capitol Hill right away. On March 15, eight days after “Bloody Sunday” unfolded, Johnson delivered a stirring address to the nation in which he prioritized a bill in no uncertain terms. “Our fathers believed that if this noble view of the rights of man was to flourish, it must be rooted in democracy. The most basic right of all was the right to choose your own leaders. The history of this country, in large measure, is the history of expansion of that right to all of our people. Many of the issues of civil rights are very complex and most difficult,” Johnson said, “but about this there can and should be no argument: every American citizen must have an equal right to vote.”¹⁹ In a stirring moment, the president repeated the words, “We shall overcome,” the chorus of the most popular civil rights song of the time. “There was an instant of silence, the gradually apprehended realization that the president has proclaimed, adopted as his own rallying cry, the anthem of black protest, the hymn of a hundred embattled black marchers,” speechwriter Richard Goodwin recalled in his memoirs.²⁰ Martin Luther King Jr. shed tears upon hearing the address.

Unlike with the 1964 legislation, the resistance in Congress was minimal this time around. The GOP was in no shape to join southern Democrats in obstructing the bill. “Republicans having nothing to gain,” one quipped, “from being for a civil rights bill, but they have everything to lose by being against one.”²¹ Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen made it clear that his caucus would not support another prolonged filibuster. “The right to vote is still an issue in this free country,” Dirksen said on television. “There has to be a real remedy. There has to be something durable and worthwhile. This cannot go on forever, this denial of the right to vote by ruses and devises and tests and whatever the mind can contrive to either make it very difficult or to make it impossible to vote.”²² The conservative coalition of southern Democrats and Republicans who had mounted the longest filibuster in history one year earlier barely tried this time.²³ The Senate ended a twenty-four-day filibuster on June 10 by a 71 to 29 vote and passed the measure 73 to 27.

On August 6, 1965, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act (VRA) into law. The historic legislation prohibited states from using literacy tests and required states and local governments that had a history of denying the vote to obtain preclearance if they were going to implement any changes in their voting laws. The VRA established a specific formula that the government could use to determine which jurisdictions would fall under the preclearance requirements (Section 5). The legislation complemented the Supreme Court’s one-man, one-vote decisions (Baker v. Carr [1962] and Reynolds v. Sims [1964])—which outlawed legislative districts that had given conservative, rural voters disproportionate power compared with the residents of heavily populated, and more liberal, cities—as well as ratification of the Twenty-Fourth Amendment in 1964, which banned poll taxes. At the signing ceremony, Johnson praised the bill as “one of the most monumental laws in the entire history of American freedom.”²⁴ Many keen observers, sensitive to the long tradition of presidential exaggeration, agreed that with this bold statement, LBJ was spot on. A new era of American democracy, or so it seemed, had dawned.

Although opponents challenged the legislation, the Supreme Court repeatedly defended its constitutionality in several cases. Before the dust had even settled, South Carolina attorney general Daniel McLeod attempted to undermine the bill by challenging the law in the Supreme Court, claiming that the VRA didn’t square with states’ rights. The law, he argued, would also treat voting systems differently in different parts of the country. In South Carolina v. Katzenbach (1966), the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren upheld the VRA by eight to one. The Fifteenth Amendment, according to the majority, “authorizes the National Legislature to effectuate by ‘appropriate’ measures the constitutional prohibition against racial discrimination in voting.”²⁵ In the 1969 case Allen v. State Board of Elections, the Court affirmed by a seven-to-two majority that the preclearance rules covered every kind of change in the voting laws and that in states where such changes had not been approved, individuals could not be deprived of the ability to vote.²⁶ According to Warren in the majority opinion, voting rights were “aimed at the subtle, as well as the obvious, state regulations which have the effect of denying citizens their right to vote because of their race.” Protected by the Court, the VRA was the law of the land.

Footnotes

^{18 Roy Reed, “Alabama Police Use Gas and Clubs to Rout Negros,” New York Times, March 8, 1965.
19 Lyndon Johnson, “Speech before Congress on Voting Rights,” March 15, 1965, https://millercenter.org.
20 Julian E. Zelizer, The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society (New York: Penguin, 2015), 214.
21 Zelizer, 203–4.
22 Zelizer, 206–7.
23 Zelizer, 125–27.
24 Caroll Kilpatrick, “Vote Rights Bill Signed in Ceremony at Capitol,” Washington Post, 7 August 7, 1965.
25 South Carolina v. Katzenbach, March 7, 1966.
26 Allen v. State Board of Elections, March 3, 1969, https://www.oyez.org.}