Seventy years ago, a coalition of young lawyers, activists, preachers and Americans of conscience joined together for a monumental fight: to secure the right to vote and dismantle segregation across the Jim Crow South.
Ten years later, the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which celebrates its 60th anniversary today, transformed Black voter participation. But recent moves by the reactionary right have eroded its protections. In an op-ed published on the Daily Kos website this week, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s interim President and CEO Bryan Fair argues that the time has come for a new voting rights act to meet this moment.
Fair tells the story of Fred Gray, a young lawyer and civil rights hero who took on Jim Crow laws in Montgomery, Alabama, in the 1950s and 1960s. When Fair came to Tuscaloosa to teach law at the University of Alabama, he immersed himself in the records of civil rights legal battles. “I read case after case from that era,” Fair wrote. “Mr. Gray had filed nearly every one.”
Threats to voting rights have grown over the last decade. After the 2013 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder, restrictions on access to the ballot box have expanded.
“Our democracy today is at a similar inflection point as that faced by civil rights activists in the 1950s and ’60s,” Fair wrote. “Many of those who have a seat in the halls of power are hell-bent on denying Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities a voice in shaping our future.”
As we honor the legacy of the Voting Rights Act on its 60th anniversary, we must also prepare for a fight to secure its protections for new generations. “As the young foot soldiers before us knew, what we are fighting for is far more powerful than these moments of defeat,” Fair wrote. “In coalition, we can, and will, move the nation ever closer to a multiracial, inclusive democracy.”
To read Fair’s entire column, click here.
Image at top: Fred Gray, a lawyer who took on Jim Crow laws in Montgomery, Alabama, in the 1950s and 1960s, is shown in a picture from March 19, 1955. “Our democracy today is at a similar inflection point as that faced by civil rights activists in the 1950s and ’60s,” SPLC interim President and CEO Bryan Fair writes for Daily Kos. (Credit: Gene Herrick/Associated Press)