Demanding Democracy: The Continuing Struggle for the Right to Vote

When the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 extended suffrage to black men, the South seemed forever changed. After the Reconstruction Act of 1867, enacted by Congressional Republicans, blacks won political offices and, as state legislators, funded schools, colleges, and medical facilities to educate and care for the freed people. The Fifteenth Amendment enshrined in the Constitution appeared to make the right to vote permanent. White supremacists responded to black male voting with intimidation and violence, and then with unevenly applied literacy tests, ballot box laws (which required guessing in which box to place a ballot), poll taxes, and the White Primary, in which only whites could nominate electoral candidates. These measure reduced blacks again to political powerlessness. For example, in Louisiana in 1896, there were 130,344 registered black voters and 164,884 whites. By 1900, only 5,320 black registered voters remained statewide. By1910 there were only 1,772 statewide. Migration out of state does not explain these falling numbers.

It took a three-pronged movement to regain the federal right to vote. The Supreme Court ruled some of the practices used to deny the vote as unconstitutional, and the movement to abolish poll taxes eventually succeeded when the Twenty-Fourth Amendment to the Constitution was finally ratified in 1964. Then there was the nonviolent direct action of the Civil Rights Movement, which Gary May vividly describes in Bending Toward Justice. This is a history focusing on the struggle of blacks and their allies who fought, marched, went to jail, and died to regain the right to vote. He emphasizes how white segregationists’ brutal repression of the movement resulted in increasing public support for the protestors, as it was all covered on nationwide television.

May explains that it took a bipartisan vote in Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the final campaign of the protest movement. It also required the efforts and signature of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who expressed his understanding that he was consigning the Democratic Party to defeat from white Southern voters by signing the Voting Rights Act into law. This Act gave the Justice Department power to remove racially discriminatory barriers to voting that, despite the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, dated back to Reconstruction. Section 2 gives the Justice Department the right to sue when any standard, practice, or procedure results in the denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen to vote on account of race or color. Section 4 of the Act provides a “coverage formula,” defining the “covered jurisdictions” as States or political subdivisions that maintained tests or devices as prerequisites to voting and, presumably as a result, had low voter registration or turnout. In those covered jurisdictions, Section 5 of the Act provides that no change in voting procedures can take effect until approved by a federal court or the Justice Department. May narrates the history of the Act over the years and the repeated Congressional extensions of the provisions through 2006. The next extension is scheduled for 2031.

May utilizes well the autobiographies of movement people, including Andrew Young, John Lewis, and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) James Forman, who kept the ministers in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) motivated. He also has a straightforward discussion of South Carolina v. Katzenbach, the first Supreme Court case deciding the Act was constitutional. He includes material from national and local newspapers like the Anniston Star and others in Alabama.

This book also relies heavily on the work of many others, including Taylor Branch, Steven Lawson, Harvard Sitkoff, Clayborne Carson, Adam Fairclough, J. Mills Thornton, and Mays’ own book on Viola Liuzzo’s murder and subsequent events. Darlene Clark Hine, in Black Victory: The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas (1979, 2003), has detailed the steps and players in the 1944 Smith v. Allwright case, a precursor to the 1965 Voting Rights Act. She discusses the role that...