Letters from an American - August 5, 2025

Episode Date: August 6, 2025

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Hello, this is Michael Moss. Heather Cox Richardson is traveling today, and her travel arrangements did not allow her time to read today's letter, so I will be reading it in her place. August 5th, 2025. 60 years ago tomorrow, on August 6th, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed. the Voting Rights Act. The need for the law was explained in its full title, an act to enforce the 15th Amendment to the Constitution and for other purposes. In the wake of the Civil

War, Americans tried to create a new nation in which the law treated black men and white men as equals. In 1865, they ratify the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, outlawing enslavement except as punishment for crimes. In 1868, they adjusted the Constitution again, guaranteeing that anyone born or naturalized in the United States, except certain indigenous Americans, was a citizen, opening up suffrage to black men. In 1870, after Georgia legislators expelled their newly seated black colleagues, Americans defended the right of black men to vote by adding that right to the Constitution. All three of those amendments, the 13th, 14th, and 15th, gave Congress the power to enforce them.

In 1870, Congress established the Department of Justice to do just that. Reactionary white Southerners had been using state laws and the unwillingness of state judges and juries to protect black Americans from white gangs and cheating employers to keep black people subservient. White men organized as the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize black men and to keep them and their white allies from voting to change that system. In 1870, the federal government stepped in to protect black rights and prosecute members of the Ku Klux Klan. With federal power now behind the constitutional protection of equality, threatening jail for those who violated the law, white opponents of black voting changed their argument against it. In 1871, they began to say that they

had no problem with black men voting on racial grounds. Their objection to black voting was that black men, just out of enslavement, were poor and uneducated. They were voting for lawmakers who promised them public services like roads and schools, and which could only be paid for with tax levies. The idea that black voters were socialists, they actually used that term in 1871, meant that white northerners who had fought to replace the hierarchical society of the Old South with a society based on equality began to change their tune. They looked the other way as white men kept black men from voting, first with terrorism and then with grandfather clauses that cut out black men without mentioning race by permitting a man to vote if his grandfather had,

literacy tests in which white registrars got to decide who passed, poll taxes, and so on. States also cut up districts unevenly to favor the Democrats who ran an all-white segregationist party. By 1880, the South was solidly Democratic, and it would remain so until 1964. Southern states always held elections. It was just foreordained that Democrats would win them. Black Americans never accepted this state of affairs, but their opposition did not gain powerful national traction until after World War II. During that war, Americans from all walks of life had turned out to defeat fascism, a government system based on the idea that some people are better than others. Americans defended democracy and, for all that black Americans fought in segregated units

and that race riots broke out in cities across the country during the war years, and that the government interned Japanese Americans, lawmakers began to recognize that the nation could not effectively define itself as a democracy if black and brown people lived in substandard housing, received substandard educations, could not advance from menial jobs, and could not vote to change any of those circumstances. Meanwhile, black Americans and people of color who had fought for the nation overseas brought home their determination to be treated equally, especially as the financial collapse of European nations loosened their grip on the former African and Asian colonies and launched new nations.

Those interested in advancing black rights turned once again to the federal government to overrule discriminatory state laws. Spurred by lawyers, Thurgood Marshall, and Constance Baker-Motley, judges used the due process clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to argue that the protections in the Bill of Rights applied to the states. That is, the states could not deprive any American of equality. In 1954, the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Republican former governor of California, used this doctrine when it handed down the Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring segregated schools unconstitutional. White reactionaries responded with violence, but black Americans continued to stand up for their rights.

In 1957 and 1960, under pressure from Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, Congress passed civil rights acts designed to empower the federal government to enforce the laws protecting black voting. In 1961, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, and the Council of Federated Organizations, or COFO, began in intensive efforts to register voters and to organize communities to support political change. Because only 6.7% of black Mississippians were registered, Mississippi became a focal point, and in the Freedom Summer of 1964, organized under Bob Moses, volunteers set out to register voters. On June 21st, Ku Klux Klan members, at least one of whom was a law enforcement officer, murdered organizers James Cheney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, near Philadelphia, Mississippi,

and when discovered, laughed at the idea that they would be punished for the murders. That year, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which strengthened voting rights. When black Americans still couldn't register to vote, on March 7, 1965, in Selma, Alabama, Marchers set out from Montgomery to demonstrate that they were being kept from registering. Law enforcement officers on horseback met them with clubs on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The officers beat the marchers, fracturing the skull of young John Lewis, who would go on to serve 17 terms in Congress. On March 15th, President Johnson called for Congress to pass legislation defending America. Oregon's right to vote. It did. And on this day in 1965, the Voting Rights Act became law.

It became such a fundamental part of our legal system that Congress repeatedly reauthorized it by large margins, as recently as 2006. But in the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice John Roberts, struck down the provision of the law requiring that states with histories of voter discrimination get approval from the Department of Justice before they change their voting laws. Immediately, the legislatures of those states, now dominated by Republicans, began to pass measures to suppress the vote. In the wake of the 2020 election,

Republican-dominated states increased the rate of voter suppression. And on July 1st, 2021, the Supreme Court permitted such suppression with the Bernovich v. Democratic National Committee decision. Currently, the Supreme Court is considering whether a Louisiana district map that took race into consideration to draw a district that would protect black representation is unconstitutional. About a third of Louisiana's residents are black. But in 2022, its legislature carved up the state in such a way that only one of its six voting districts was majority black. A federal court determined that the map violated the Voting Rights Act, so the legislature redrew the map to give the state two majority black districts.

A group of non-African American voters immediately challenged the law. law, saying the new maps violated the 14th Amendment because the mapmakers prioritized race when drawing them. A divided federal court agreed with their argument. Now the Supreme Court will weigh in. Meanwhile, on July 29th, Senator Raphael Warnock, a Democrat of Georgia, led a number of his Democratic colleagues in reintroducing a measure to restore and expand the Voting Rights Act. The bill is called the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act after the man whose skull, police officers fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Letters from an American was written by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead in Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.

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