It’s been 50 years since President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, and local leaders said Thursday there’s still a long way to go.
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“Sharecroppers, maids, ordinary folks – had it not been for them awakening the consciousness of the nation, the president could not have mustered the political support that was required to ultimately get this seminal law passed”, Obama said. Here’s a closer look at the Wednesday ruling, the law and where the case stands now.
Michaux said “history is repeating itself” with the current voter ID law.
It should be a day for remembering the courageous souls who died in the voting rights struggle – and the thousands of others who risked life and limb to right the great injustice that Johnson said “no American, in his heart, can justify”.
Without that provision to rely on, opponents of the voter ID law had to meet the higher threshold under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of proving the law discriminated against minority voters. Without barriers like literacy tests and poll taxes, Black Americans could finally have a voice in the country they lived in.
Cobb-Hunter also said the state’s most recent redrawing of voting district lines, timed every 10 years to new Census figures, has made it more hard to protect the right to vote.
Louisville NAACP president Raoul Cunningham lamented a 2013 Supreme Court decision striking down a key portion of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
In the 1960s, black and white demonstrators in the South marched, suffered and even gave their lives so that all Americans might be guaranteed the right to vote.
The conference comes a day after a federal court invalidated Texas’s voter ID law. “The right to vote is the most precious right and obligation you have”.
However, the decision was not an outright victory for supporters of the Voting Rights Act, as the court sent the law back to a lower court to be amended. The League of Women Voters has been standing its ground in the fight against discrimination and for voting rights protections for 95 years, and restoring the VRA is an important step to keep our elections fair, free and accessible.
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Lynch said that voter ID laws weren’t fundamentally unconstitutional, and that the Department of Justice has approved others still being enforced. “On the ground there are still too many ways in which people are discouraged from voting”.
