On the 50th Anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, There's Not a Lot to Celebrate

Thursday marks the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon B. Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act into law. With the Act, African Americans were finally granted protections to exercise the voting freedoms granted to them with the passing of the 15th amendment in 1870. The 1965 voting rights hammer landed heaviest on local election officials who had been enforcing a number of discriminatory measures—literacy tests, poll taxes, all the violence depicted in Ava DuVernay’s movie Selma—to keep black people from voting.

More recently, the actual political power of black elected officials throughout the South has waned considerably, thanks to an onslaught of new local laws that have made it more difficult for people of color to vote. From a recent New York Times editorial: