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This past week reminds us that history is rarely neat, often scary, and requires courage and determination to bend the universe toward justice.
About 30 colleagues represented the Brennan Center in Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, to mark the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. That was the peaceful march led by young John Lewis, met with police and vigilante violence. The televised assault provoked national outrage, which led to the enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
“The visit to Montgomery was a meaningful one not just because of the 60th anniversary of the march, but because of the flood of new efforts seeking to erase and reverse the progress achieved by the people who crossed the bridge in 1965,” said Kareem Crayton, who led the Brennan Center’s group across the Edmund Pettus Bridge this past Sunday.
Today’s fight to vote does not involve police batons or snarling dogs. Rather, it is embodied in laws and legislation, court rulings, firings of election security officials, and attacks on voting advocates.
It unfolds in courtrooms, of course: Those working to suppress the vote are currently trying to convince federal courts that citizens are not allowed to seek redress under the Voting Rights Act when their freedom to vote is violated. One federal appeals court has already embraced that radical view.
We see it in firings: The new administration dismissed the entire set of officials at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency who worked on protecting elections from attack, clearing a path for malevolent foreign or domestic actors to try to manipulate the voting system.
It even happens in job interviews. Candidates for top administration positions are asked whether they believe in the Big Lie that Donald Trump really won the 2020 election — the conspiracy theory used to justify voting restrictions.
The pace seems to be accelerating. This week, President Trump signed an executive order aimed at a law firm, Perkins Coie. The order revokes the security clearance of its employees, bars them from federal buildings, and threatens investigations of companies that hire the firm. Among other justifications, the order cites Perkins Coie’s litigation to stop voter suppression.
It’s hard to think of a clearer application of inappropriate government power, plainly aiming to chill free speech and scare the legal community to force it to back off from defending the rule of law in America.
Today’s voter restrictions can come on the floor of Congress too. The House will soon vote on the SAVE Act, which would essentially require citizens to produce a passport or birth certificate to be able to register (or re-register) to vote. At least 21 million Americans lack ready access to those documents. The measure would essentially eliminate registration online, by mail, or through registration drives. It would be the worst voting bill ever enacted by Congress.
Congress can provide a positive answer instead. Rep. Terry Sewell (D-AL) last week introduced an updated version of the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. This legislation would restore the full strength of that law after it was gutted by the Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder. It would apply current data to protect voting rights all over the country. That’s the right way for Congress to address voting: with facts, not fear.
Today’s fight to vote does not yet call on us to show the physical bravery displayed by the heroes on the Edmund Pettus Bridge 60 years ago. The barriers they faced were much more severe than those of today. But it summons each of us to action nevertheless.
At the end of the march from Selma to Montgomery, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke before the Alabama State House. In a less-remembered part of that remarkable oration, King explained that the Jim Crow system was rooted not merely in racism but in raw political and economic calculus of the robber baron–dominated 1890s.
“The threat of the free exercise of the ballot by the Negro and the white masses alike resulted in the establishing of a segregated society,” King said. “They segregated southern money from the poor whites; they segregated southern mores from the rich whites; they segregated southern churches from Christianity; they segregated southern minds from honest thinking, and they segregated the Negro from everything.”
The fight to vote, King understood, went well beyond the technical matter of the franchise to the wider question of what kind of government we had and what kind of society we would live in. How long would progress take, he asked. “Not long, because no lie can live forever.”
