Voting Rights and the Second Redemption

Most people do not realize, our Constitution does not explicitly give anyone the right to vote.

The states determine eligibility, and their rules and procedures vary enormously. Over time, constitutional amendments have prevented the states from limiting suffrage in specific ways. The 15th Amendment bars states from denying the right to vote because of race, the 19th does the same for sex, and later amendments prohibit poll taxes and mandate that people cannot be denied the vote because of age so long as they are 18.

But numerous other modes of disfranchisement remain perfectly constitutional.

Ari Berman’s important recent book, Give Us the Ballot - Farrar, Straus and Giroux, explores the struggle over voting rights unleashed by the civil-rights revolution, and how it continues to this day.

Berman has performed a valuable public service by illuminating this history. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, inspired by police violence against voting-rights demonstrators in Selma, Alabama, was a democratic triumph. The VRA authorized the federal government to invalidate procedures in Southern states with long histories of racist disenfranchisement and to directly register voters where local authorities refused to do so. And it required states with the most egregious histories in this regard to obtain prior approval from Washington for changes in their voting rules and procedures.

Reconstruction, the era after the Civil War, witnessed a vast expansion of democracy, with black men for the first time voting and holding office in large numbers, and then a period of reaction, known by its proponents as “Redemption,” in which these rights were stripped away. The civil rights revolution was sometimes called the Second Reconstruction. Today, when it comes to voting, we seem to be in the midst of a Second Redemption. As Give Us the Ballot makes clear, democratic rights can never be taken for granted.

CLICK HERE to read Eric Foner's book review on The Nation.











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