Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lewis and many others ( black & white) put themselves in dangerous situations, commonly marked by violence and time in jail, to increase awareness about the fact that voting rights, especially in the southern states, were very purposely designed to suppress Black and minority voters. The 1965 signing of the Voting Rights Act by Lyndon Johnson, made nearly all voter suppression tactics illegal across this country. And when Congress enacted the Voting Rights Act, it did so with for following reason: ‘to address entrenched racial discrimination in voting, and “insidious and pervasive evil which has been perpetuated in certain parts of our country through unremitting and ingenious defiance of the Constitution.”  Those are not my words. Those are in the official record. The intent and purpose of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act was to disallow any changes to voting procedures UNLESS & UNTIL the new procedures were determined, by the Justice Department or a federal court in Washington, D.C., to have no discriminatory purposes or effects. SOUNDS GOOD, RIGHT? And it was. Black registration rates in the former Confederate states rebounded from 30 percentage points below white registration rates in 1960 to equal or greater than white registration rates in 2010. Black turnout in elections followed a similar positive pattern. The results were incredible. In 1965, there were only five African Americans in the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate combined. Today there are 48.  And across all state and local offices, the change is even more remarkable. Since 1965, African-Americans went from holding fewer than a 1,000 offices nationwide to over 10,000. So what IS the problem?  Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act is the problem. On June 25, 2013, the United States Supreme Court decided that it is unconstitutional to continue forcing states to submit possible changes to their voting rules for approval by the Justice Department.  The result of the 5-4 decision?  Twenty-one  states now have new voting restrictions— including strict voter ID requirements, no online voter registration, no pre-registration for teens about to turn 18, and serious cutbacks to Sunday and early morning voting for low-income workers. If you’re familiar with the names of U.S. Supreme Court Judges, you can probably guess who voted for this change: Chief Justice John Roberts, along with Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. To assert that this decision was not a political decision would be wandering too far from the truth of the matter....  … especially when we learn who was against this destructive change: Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/onewhitewoman/message