Bending Toword Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy by Gary May (review)

In this extremely compelling narrative, historian Gary May does a masterful job of connecting the actions of blacks in the south who wished to exercise their political rights and broader local, regional, and national developments. He also makes judicious use of data to demonstrate the changes in participation in the electoral system of blacks as both voters and office holders.

With the passage of the 14^th and 15^th Amendments during the period of Radical Reconstruction after the Civil War, “as many as two thousand (blacks) served as state legislators, city councilmen, tax assessors, justices of the peace, jurors, sheriffs and U.S. marshals; fourteen black politicians entered the House of Representatives; and two became U.S. senators” (xi). However, “by 1877 southern white Democrats had overthrown every new state government and established state constitutions that stripped black citizens of their political rights” (xi).

For approximately 80 years southern states employed a number of devices to exclude blacks from registering and voting. These well-known tactics include poll taxes, literacy and “understanding” tests, and residency and property requirements. The significance of the ballot was best stated by Thurgood Marshall, who opined that without it “you have no citizenship, no status, no power in this country” (xiii).

May details back- and front-stage developments leading to the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA). Perhaps the most infamous of these was the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965 (“Bloody Sunday”). Although Dr. King was in Atlanta, he was aware of the brutality at the march and believed that images of the event would arouse the American people. Executives at ABC television decided to run its fifteen-minute footage of the beatings at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Americans demonstrated across the nation, thousands travelled to Selma, and numerous religious leaders came in response to Dr. King’s call for a march from Selma to Montgomery.

Throughout this period President Johnson refused to intervene to protect the voting rights of blacks. However, a tipping point was reached at which he directed his staff to work on a draft of a voting rights bill. He addressed a joint session of Congress and announced that a voting bill would be forthcoming. At the same time and in spite of criticism, Dr. King organized the march from Selma to Montgomery.

May devotes an informative chapter to the Washington politics that transformed the bill into the VRA of 1965. A bill with bipartisan support was passed by the Senate and by the House, and the version that emerged from Conference received support in both houses (House: 328–74; Senate: 79–18). On Friday, August 6, 1965, President Johnson signed the bill, and the VRA became law. A major limitation of the VRA was that it called for a reconsideration of the “trigger” and “preclearance” sections in five years. The Act survived criticism in each house of congress, and was signed, not always enthusiastically, by presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and by G. W. Bush for a 25 year extension in 2006.

Recent attempts to limit voter registration and the June 25, 2013 Supreme Court Decision (Shelby County v. Holder) attacking a portion of the VRA (See John Paul Stevens, “The Court & the Right to Vote: A Dissent,” The New York Review of Books, August 15, 2013) make evident that the battle is not over and that “‘Voter Suppression’ is as American as cherry pie” (253).