Will Bunch on the Destruction of the Voting Rights Act

I’ve been thinking about writing my feelings about seeing the Voting Rights Act come into being and then extinguished, but not for now. I’ll let Will Bunch say some things (gift link).

When the news broke Wednesday morning that the U.S. Supreme Court’s six conservative justices had taken a wrecking ball to the last vestiges of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act, my mind went back in time to an oppressively hot day in the summer of 1984, driving up and down the red hills of western Alabama with a remarkable tour guide named Wendell Paris.

On TV, it was morning in Ronald Reagan’s America, but off camera in predominantly Black Sumter County, Ala., they were taking out the trash, quite literally. The trash-hauling giant, Waste Management, had built the nation’s largest toxic-waste dump — an environmental justice nightmare — in a tiny hamlet called Emelle.

Paris, who, as a 1960s college student, had fought for civil rights in Alabama’s most dangerous counties, took me — a 20-something reporter for the Birmingham News — to meet underpaid Black workers who went down into the pits with no protective gear, and to show me the sprawling estate of the local white lawyer who got rich doing Waste Management’s bidding.

But Paris was fighting Waste Management with a weapon Alabama’s African Americans could not have dreamed of a generation earlier: a position of political power. He’d been elected chair of the Sumter County Board of Education, and he and a new generation of other first-time Black officials were fighting daily for better schools and economic justice that had been denied under segregation.

By 1984, twenty years had passed, and the VRA was making a difference.

It was a time when government could not only do big things but make them work. The VRA ended racist practices like literacy tests and poll taxes that, for decades under Jim Crow segregation, had kept the vast majority of Black people in places like Sumter County or Birmingham from voting, even after the 15th Amendment supposedly guaranteed that right. The law also required political maps that would guarantee Black representation in these former Confederate states with large African American populations, launching the congressional careers of legends like Barbara Jordan of Texas and Andrew Young of Georgia.

The great Joan Didion’s most famous observation was that we tell ourselves stories in order to live. I can’t understate how central the 1965 Voting Rights Act has been to the story that my generation of boomers told ourselves about believing in the American dream.

The narrative that took someone like John Lewis out from under those police batons in Selma and into the corridors of Congress, and that peaked with Barack Obama’s once unthinkable election as America’s first Black president in 2008, seemed proof positive of another famous MLK maxim: that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

I had a slightly different story from the Boomers, that the sixties had started with the hope of civil rights and the VRA and had ended in the bitterness of Vietnam and drugs. The good things that had happened seemed unfinished, and the hedonism of the seventies erased the purpose. But we made progress, and it continued up until this decade. Somehow, we didn’t secure it.

Legal scholars will no doubt study and debate for many years to come how the nation’s highest court came to view the legislative high point of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement as meaning the exact opposite of what Lyndon B. Johnson and that era’s lawmakers thought they were enacting. But the political and psychic fallout is already here.

John Roberts was ten when the VRA passed. What was the story he put together? (That’s a rhetorical question, not a call to a two-minutes hate.)

Was King’s dream just a lie that didn’t come true? In hindsight, the stench of backlash was already strong in 1984, even as the wave of Black politicians from Birmingham’s Arrington to Philadelphia’s W. Wilson Goode were taking power. Sumter County’s Paris was one of several Black Alabama leaders caught up in a ridiculous voter fraud probe by an ambitious young U.S. attorney, Jeff Sessions, who would later become Donald Trump’s attorney general during the president’s first term.

It seems now that the faux granite of the Voting Rights Act wasn’t as durable as the white supremacy embedded in the red clay under Sumter County and so much of the rest of America. Every action toward a more diverse and more democratic nation — especially Obama’s election in 2008 — triggered an equal and opposite reaction.

Dreams can be beautiful, but they aren’t reality. Even though the alarm was set years ago, Wednesday’s Supreme Court ruling was still a piercing wake-up call for anyone who wants the United States to ever fulfill its promise of democracy. If the Voting Rights Act didn’t save America, we need even more revolutionary action this time around.

If a corrupt and broken Supreme Court insists on playing partisan politics, then we need partisan politicians to bring them to heel. Expand the court to 13 justices, impose term limits, and investigate and impeach any justices who broke the laws about gifts or anything else.

Radical steps? You bet, but the alternative is allowing a kangaroo court to finish the job of dismantling the American Experiment, of turning a dream that became a lie into something worse. We can’t bend the arc of the moral universe until we grab it back from the people who stole it.