The Supreme Court’s gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act

The Supreme Court’s gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) in its Callais decision April 29 eviscerated what has been called the “jewel” of the 1950s-1960s civil rights movement. Along with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1968 Fair Housing Act and the less well-known Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the VRA was the legislative victory of civil rights activism of the period.

The VRA’s aim was to put the federal government behind enforcement of voting rights to outlaw the many ways that state governments, particularly in the Jim Crow South, had used to disenfranchise Black voters in the 100 years since the end of Reconstruction after the Civil War. For many historians, the gains embodied in the VRA—added to constitutional amendments that enfranchised women and adults 18 and older—extended democratic rights to the mass of the population for the first time in U.S. history.

When Congress passed the VRA, it entitled it as an act “to enforce the 15^th Amendment to the Constitution,” the post-civil war amendment that forbid “denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The Congress reauthorized the VRA four times, the last time in 2006 with nearly unanimous support.

But all of that didn’t matter to the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court. In a decision that is surely to take its place among one of the worst in its very long history of bad decisions, the Court declared unconstitutional one of the VRA’s enforcement mechanisms against racially motivated gerrymandering: the creation of legislative districts where Black or other racial or language minorities would have a chance to elect representatives aligned with their preferences.

The Supreme Court has validated the logic of so called “reverse racism”

If the VRA of 1965 dealt a devastating blow to Jim Crow racial discrimination, this latest Supreme Court decision upheld the reactionary logic of so called “reverse discrimination” against whites.

To the right-wing Supreme Court majority, the remedy to racial discrimination—preventing racial gerrymandering and creating “minority-majority” or “minority-influence” districts—is itself racially discriminatory under the 15^th Amendment. If map drawers can claim that their maps are merely “partisan” carve-ups and aren’t careless enough to publish their intentions to discriminate against Black voters, they can redraw their maps to lock in conservative partisan dominance for a generation.

Within days of the decision, states in the former confederacy moved quickly to revise their congressional maps. As many as a dozen Black Democratic representatives could lose their seats. The effect will not only be a “whitening” of Southern congressional districts, but it will mean the reduction of Democrat-held seats and the creation of nearly monolithic Republican congressional delegations.

For the next several rounds of federal elections, Republican-dominated and Democrat-dominated states will be engaged in a “redistricting arms race” as they try to fashion maps that give their party the advantage in state and federal elections. While that might be how the Callais decision initially unfolds, it will have detrimental longer-term results that will make the U.S. a less democratic and more unequal place than it already is.

We know this because anyone with a rudimentary (non-MAGAified) understanding of U.S. history will know that the movements for African American civil rights have always been the vanguard in the struggle to extend democratic rights for all in the U.S. As the Marxist activist and scholar CLR James wrote in 1948,

“Under the banner of Negro democratic rights, struggling purely for what seem to be limited objectives, the independent Negro movement is contributing to the release of the proletariat from the stranglehold of the Democratic Party and giving it an opportunity and a possibility lo emerge as an independent political force.

“This is our basic position. It can be concretized and will have to be developed. But it is clear that we cannot look upon the independent Negro movement as episodic or of little importance. It is a part of the political life of the country and, more important, of fundamental importance for the political development of the proletariat.”

Conversely, times of reaction and rollback of African American civil rights are also times of attacks on other oppressed groups and the working class as a whole.

James was writing at a time when the movement for civil rights was gathering steam before it would break out into mass activism in the 1950s and 1960s. This time was also that of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union when both superpowers competed for influence among new nations emerging from domination of the old colonial powers after the Second World War. As the U.S. tried to win “hearts and minds” in what was then called “the Third World,” apartheid conditions in the Southern U.S. worked against its attempt to project U.S. democracy as a model to follow. For this reason, a segment of the U.S. ruling class also saw a need to reform the U.S.’s Jim Crow system.

The Cold War has been over for nearly 40 years. The Trump administration is rapidly dismantling the U.S.-led international order that, however hypocritically, promoted ideologies of democracy and human rights. The current U.S. government’s action as a “predatory hegemon” doesn’t even pretend to be concerned with democracy abroad. So why should it be concerned with democracy at home?

On the contrary, the Trump administration and the most retrograde elements of the Republican Party, who have wanted to undermine Black political power for a generation, now have no inhibition about doing so. In his more than a decade of dominating US politics, Trump has also found that he can openly espouse racism—from declaring nonwhite majority countries as “shitholes” to allegations of voter fraud in nonwhite majority cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta—and not suffer meaningful consequences for it. In fact, Trump’s racism enervates a significant part of his “base,” a Republican Party built from the backlash to the gains of the 1960s/1970s social movements.

The current Supreme Court is simply the “respectable” wing of this backlash politics, finding legal justifications in support of dismantling the last generation’s social progress.

It’s important to note, as James points out, that there is a close connection between advancements in civil rights and equality throughout the working class. The Reconstruction period (1865-1877) following the Civil War marked the entrance of the formerly enslaved into the U.S. political system. The 14^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1868, established that anyone born in the US was a citizen and that all people in the deserved “equal protection of the laws”. Although the 14^th Amendment addressed the status of African Americans, it applied to all people in the U.S.

The late 1800s Populist movement of Black and white farmers in the U.S. South and Midwest against big business advanced demands for public ownership of railroads, progressive taxation, and crop assistance to farmers, among others. Populism’s defeat in the 1890s not only opened the door to Jim Crow oppression against Blacks, but it also disenfranchised poor whites.

The 1950s-1960s civil rights and Black Power movements sparked a “rights revolution” that empowered women, Chicanos, American Indians, and LGBTQ people to fight for their rights too. All these movements, taking place alongside the movement to end the war in Vietnam, had a profound impact on rank-and-file activism in the labor movement.

Although it proved fleeting, the 2020 racial justice uprising that occurred after the murder of George Floyd shook the U.S. and its major institutions. As Sharon Smith wrote in June 2020: “For the first time in many years, a sense of hope has begun to replace the despair that has pervaded U.S. society for so long. We can thank the protesters—and yes, the rioters—for finally giving voice to the unheard.”

How the liberal establishment allowed MAGA to “make racism acceptable again”

So, given the distance between 2020 and today, an obvious question to ask is “how did we get here?” The question of geopolitics and the Trumpists’ “making racism acceptable again” are two parts of the explanation. But another part of the explanation must consider the role of the liberal establishment, the ostensible defender of liberty and equality in the U.S. system.

For all the liberal tribute paid to the sacrifices of civil rights activists in the 1960s, liberal and Democratic Party leaders have seemed strangely subdued in their reaction to the Supreme Court’s tearing the heart out of the VRA. The solution Democrats offer is to more aggressively gerrymander “blue” states to maintain Democratic parity with the Republicans. Even Black politicians who may find themselves out of office after Republican gerrymanders eliminate their seats have not issued calls for mass opposition to this rights rollback.

There are many reasons for this. But one that stands out is the degree to which a layer of African American officeholders, most of them Democrats, have been incorporated into the political establishment. They are not grassroots leaders of an opposition. As the radical Black scholar Robert L. Allen wrote in 1969, when Black Democrats were beginning to win office in cities and states, “Black people were supposed to get the impression that progress was being made, and that they were finally being let in the front door. . .. The intention is to create an impression of real movement while actual movement is too limited to be significant.”

Almost 50 years later, it’s wrong to say that no progress has been made for African Americans or for other oppressed people in the U.S. But the Supreme Court’s recent actions are reminders that progress isn’t guaranteed. It can be rolled back. And the Black political class and its Democratic Party associates have shown that they are not up to the task of standing up to the right’s concerted attack.

In this time of reaction, it’s worth remembering a key lesson from the 1960s Second Reconstruction, as the socialist Manning Marable recounted in his Race, Reform and Rebellion:

“The Second Reconstruction actually began in earnest on 1 February 1960” when four young Black students sat in at a “whites’ only” lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. “The student revolt of February 1960, was, for the NAACP leadership [ed., the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the moderate civil rights leadership that stressed a legal path for civil rights] a completely unpredicted event.

Marable cites a well-known history of the period that credits the student sit-in movement for speeding up “incalculably the rate of social change in the sphere of race relations, [breaking] decisively the NAACP’s hegemony in the civil rights arena and [inaugurating] an unprecedented rivalry among the racial advancement groups…”

The lesson isn’t that 21^st century social movements must retrace the steps of their 20^th century predecessors. It’s that today, in a climate of widespread disapproval of the government, a mass protest movement holds the potential to sweep aside leaders and organizations that aren’t meeting the moment.