What is the Voting Rights Act?

Liam Heffernan: 00:00:41

This week I am discussing one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in US History, Signs during the fervor of the civil rights movement. It stands as a monument to the unfinished struggle for democracy.

So I want to go beyond the legal text and peel back the layers of history, injustice, activism and resilience that not just made it possible, but continue to define its relevance. As I ask, what is the Voting Rights Act? Welcome to America, a history podcast.

I'm Liam Heffernan and every week we answer a different question to understand the people, the places and the events that make the USA a what it is today. To discuss. And returning to the podcast, I am joined by an associate professor of international history at the University of East Anglia.

He's an expert on 20th century US researching race, internationalism and transnational activism, which sounds very important, but it's not that scary. Welcome back, Nigrant.

Nicholas Grant: 00:01:59

Yeah, a lot of isms in that title, but thank you so much for having me, Liam. It's a pleasure to be back.

Liam Heffernan: 00:02:04

It's always good to have you on the podcast and for something that, I mean, you know, we've discussed the civil rights a fair bit on this podcast, so I think now we're at that point where we need to start digging into like some of the, the real kind of minutiae of like what, what made sort of civil rights possible in the US and, and the Voting Rights act is a, a huge part of that, right?

Nicholas Grant: 00:02:25

Yeah, absolutely.

And I think there's going to be some nice crossover with previous episodes about Rosa Parks or like key myths associated with the civil rights movement. I feel like I'm always on the podcast emphasizing the importance of grassroots struggle and things like that. So some similar themes will come up.

But I think the Voting Rights act as a lens is really, really interesting, really, really important to dig into some of that detail. And of course, it's a live issue today as well.

Like we've seen kind of the erosion of voting rights in certain ways in America, which hopefully we'll get onto talking about too.

Liam Heffernan: 00:02:56

Yeah, absolutely. I always feel like because of just like what your research interests are, it always feels a little bit doom and gloom.

The subjects that we talk about on the, on the podcast with you. But it's so necessary because you say there's such a present day relevance to matters around race and civil rights in there.

Nicholas Grant: 00:03:12

Yeah, I do. And I find that in my teaching and often have to say to my students, wow, that was a depressing two hours, wasn't it?

But I think there's Also an element of hope. Right. I think if we sent us some of the.

In this episode, like the how people achieve legislative change, how people push for that, how people mobilize. There's also an element of hope, hopefully, like, in terms of how you can change situations that you may disagree with or.

Or circumstances or institutions or frameworks that you think are perpetuating forms of injustice and how people kind of find a way to challenge those. Right. I think that I try and when I'm thinking about, oh, God, I don't want to, like, depress people too much.

Like, I try and make sure we're centering that. Right.

So if people are on the same page and kind of agree politically that we might need to push back against some of these things, there's a bit of a roadmap or a historical kind of lesson to learn about how people have done that in the past.

Liam Heffernan: 00:04:03

Absolutely. Well, I mean, on that note, let's look back. So a nice, easy, quick question to start. What were the circumstances that led to the Voting Rights Act?

Nicholas Grant: 00:04:18

Right. I'm going to be a typical historian and go quite far back here. Right.

r, roughly the period between: 1865

At the start of that era, you have the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, which give end slavery, give citizenship rights, and give voting rights to African American men. After that system of slavery is abolished, right through the Civil War, which is initially like a really radical and really successful.

lly a big kind of betrayal in: 1877

But there's a very close contested election, and the Republican and Democratic kind of nominees decide essentially if the federal government removes forces from the south, kind of gives up a little bit on Reconstruction, that they can kind of have the election result.

So you have this moment where essentially it's a compromise where the federal government believes it's better to reintegrate white Southerners and former slaveholders and the planter class back into the nation rather than contesting this election and keeping up the institution of Reconstruction. So that's at the expense of the rights of African Americans.

Alongside that, and immediately as Reconstruction starts, you have Jim Crow, segregation kind of after the fall of Reconstruction. But you have racial violence that is also kind of trying to police and maintain the kind of racial and social order as well.

So all of that is kind of really, really important. Right.

t get that moment again until: 1965

It had to be overturned through mass civil disobedience movements, grassroot camp campaigns, legal advocacy.

And the Voting Rights Act, I think, is a testament of the power of ordinary people to take this situation over a long period of time where African American rights had been realized and they were quickly eroded, and to make quite extraordinary change as well.

So to answer that question properly, I would always kind of go back to that moment of Reconstruction, that moment of possibility and how that ended really sets the scene for kind of what. Where the origins for the struggle for voting rights really kind of start.

century all the way up to the: 1960

Liam Heffernan: 00:07:19

I would agree with that, because I think the Reconstruction era and those years following the Civil War and everything that's tied up inside of emancipation, it really brought into question that stark difference between freedom from slavery and civil equality, because there were a lot of people, a lot of white people, even in the north, who were abolitionists fighting fiercely against the idea of slavery, who still did not believe in any way that black and white men were equal.

Nicholas Grant: 00:07:47

Yeah, it's a really kind of powerful moment, and maybe it's a bit too simplistic to think about that in terms of. Think about this in terms of Reconstruction.

But I often hear discussions about, like, well, of course, people did racist things or thought racist things or acted in a way that perpetuated racial inequality, but back in those times, because that's just how people thought back then.

But actually, like the moment of Reconstruction shows there was a group of radical Republicans and the federal government, for a short period of time, lent considerable force and put considerable power behind giving and then protecting the rights of black Americans that they'd fought for during the Civil War. And we think of maybe the light late 19th century was like a different era where these kind of politically progressive moments don't happen.

But Reconstruction, for that brief window, shows that actually that argument that, like, oh, that's just how people thought back then.

There were always people who knew that kind of systems of racial inequality, of slavery, of persecuting and limiting voting rights were morally wrong and they were willing to take a stand and fight against that. So I think Reconstruction teaches that lesson and maybe stops us from being a little bit lazy when we think about. Oh, that's just how it always was.

There was always counter voices and dissenting voices as well.

Liam Heffernan: 00:09:08

Yeah, of course. But I think, you know, this was also the era when you saw the rise of, you know, the Ku Klux Klan, sort of this sort of Jim Crow era.

And this wasn't just like rogue, like racist vigilantism, was it like this.

And I'm going to preface this by saying I don't believe that the government necessarily endorsed or financed any violence in that respect, but they turned a blind eye and they very much allowed this racial violence to happen. Right?

Nicholas Grant: 00:09:42

eral troops from the south in: 1877

If we think about the Klan and racial violence and racial intimidation, this is terrorism, like white racial terrorism against black people.

And it is done with the full knowledge of like local power brokers and officials and people who were part of that planter class, who were staunch segregationists, who were staunch defenders of slavery, who were staunch confederates during the Civil War. They would facilitate that and they.

And they would kind of ramp that up and they would fund that in certain ways as well in terms of maintaining that racial order. So it's not just a few kind of fringe vigilante groups. It is embedded in the kind of response to the ending of slavery and of abolition.

That white backlash is so violent, so systemic that we can't kind of downplay that at all. I think it's part of American life, it's part of American culture as part of American history.

Liam Heffernan: 00:10:46

And again, thinking about that kind of federal responsibility, things like segregation and many other laws and sort of legal barriers that they refused to lift really did ensure that there was still an othering of non white Americans.

Nicholas Grant: 00:11:04

Right, yeah.

So you have this era of Jim Crow, which is often known as like the nadir in black American history, where everything looks incredibly bleak after Reconstruction. You have the kind of complete erosion of citizenship and voting rights.

You have the reinstigation of forms of labor like sharecropping, where African Americans would often kind of go back to farming the land that they did under slavery. They technically lease that land, but they wouldn't be able to make a profit of it. They didn't own it, or all of these kind of things happening.

And you have the quick kind of emergence of Jim Crow laws The black codes and then Jim Crow laws that rigidly police where black Americans can and can't be every single sector of society, whether it's in terms of where people live, where people work, where people can kind of relax and kind of access entertainment, so where people can eat and shop. Every part of kind of Southern life is segregated in this spatialized, in this spatial way.

And of course, like voting rights is something which is absolutely key to that process of Jim Crow.

hey briefly enjoyed with over: 2000

Liam Heffernan: 00:13:31

One thing that's come up in previous episodes when we've talked about civil inequality in the US is there's this, I don't even know if it's a contradiction, if that's the right word.

But this, this idea that at some point I imagine, you know, black Americans would have protested this, they would have challenged this, they may even have retaliated the hostility. But in doing so, they validate any presumption about why white people are better or more equal than black people in the first place.

You know, I think there's this like this self fulfilling prophecy that you keep, you keep black Americans down, but then when they challenge it, you're like, okay, well you know, don't, don't get aggressive. Now this is, this is why, this is why we do it. And actually there's like, there's no way to break through that, is there?

Nicholas Grant: 00:14:21

Yeah, that's a, that's a really interesting point.

I think it's, that plays on kind of long held myths about ideas relating to kind of inherent black criminality or potential for violence, all rooted in kind of racist white supremacist ideas, civilizationist rhetoric that kind of literally orders racial higher races on their ability to kind of act and think rationally and things like that. It's all kind of rooted in that.

I think what, what's kind of interesting in relation to that is that I think the reason why black Americans for long period black Americans always pushed back in lots of different ways, but the reason why it was so hard to build a mass movement early on is just because black of, well, the failure of the federal government to kind of protect some of those rights that emerged after the end of slavery.

So the lack of kind of institutional support and frameworks and then also just like how rigidly policed, like literally policed through police forces, through racial violence, through economic systems black life was in the United States.

And then you would have in terms of your point about myths and ideas relating to blackness that we used to kind of perpetuate and say, look, you know, black people shouldn't be allowed to vote because they behave in certain ways.

You kind of see really interesting, not really interesting, really kind of concerted attempts on behalf of law enforcement to cast black men in particular as dangerous and violent and threatening in terms of policing black communities. And then also those communities, those people are arrested and then put to work in chain gangs and things like that.

So if you want to think about kind of racist myths about black criminality, a lot of this kind of stems from this particular period after reconstruction where blackness is kind of codified as criminal.

And that is used then by white people in power, white landowners, to actually re enslave them in lots of ways because you can then kind of put them to work and hard labor on the land or on the chain gang and things like that.

And again, it perpetuates the idea that black people are dangerous, they're criminal and they're not fully citizens and they shouldn't be allowed the right to vote because you're seeing the long chain gang of people working at the side of the road or people working in the field because they've presumably done something wrong.

Liam Heffernan: 00:16:40

It's so relevant though, to like, what we're still seeing today, this idea of, you know, you're only going to find criminality where you're looking for it and actually these sort of systemic flaws and bias where the authorities are only looking, or I say largely sort of looking towards, you know, minority, non white communities. Well, of course you're going to find more crime.

You know, when you're ignoring everything that's happening over here in the white suburb, you're not going to see it and drawing parallels like what's happening now with the witch hunts that Trump is on with ICE and everything else. You're looking for reasons to corroborate the data. You want to be there. And that's surely historically one of the big problems, right?

Nicholas Grant: 00:17:23

Yeah. And you're playing on long held racist fears and racist assumptions and myths as well, deliberately to do that, I think. I don't know.

Have you done an episode on Birth of a Nation, part of the podcast? The film?

Liam Heffernan: 00:17:35

We have not, but we absolutely should.

Nicholas Grant: 00:17:38

on when it is released in the: 1910

It's about the danger that empowering and giving black Americans citizenship and voting rights, how dangerous that was and how threatening that was to white society.

So every kind of black character in that, and it's white people blacked up, is cast as corrupt, drunk, lazy, a potential threat in terms of a sexual threat to white women. And it's like, who. Look what's happened in that era of Reconstruction. And.

And the heroes who kind of come in are the Klansmen who kind of purge and cleanse the south from this black threat that the north has pushed on the south by empowering black men and giving them the right to vote and giving them the right to represent their communities. And that film is shown at the White House. The NAACP resists it and challenges it in kind of interesting ways.

But that becomes the narrative that there is a very good reason in white eyes that black people should not be allowed the right to vote. Because this is what happens and this is what happened in Reconstruction. And you can see that perpetuated culture and lots of other things.

You can think about Gone with the Wind and all of these kinds of things that romanticizes a kind of slave holding south and all of that.

But that, that kind of cultural representation of this moment of Reconstruction and the perpetuation of the ideas of, like, black men as violent and criminal, I think plays on in the American, white American consciousness as to why it is actually maybe dangerous to give African Americans full citizenship rights and voting rights. Because look what happened during Reconstruction. And that's what black activists and movements are pushing against.

In lots of ways, it's a sense to be seen as human and to have those basic civil and human rights.

Liam Heffernan: 00:19:39

Yeah, exactly. And so in spite of all of that, what precedents were set that kind of got the ball rolling towards what eventually was the Voting Rights Act.

Nicholas Grant: 00:19:51

Yeah, I think there's some earlier legislation, and I think there's two things about the Voting Rights Act. Right. It would not have happened without mass civil disobedience, mass protests on the ground, and grassroots activism, and we'll maybe come to that.

But also it is a very kind of prolonged and sustained legal legislative strategy that black lawyers in particular are pushing. Right. In terms of actually enacting some of these changes in terms of civil rights. So you can look at like.

So if we jump forward and think about the mid 20th century, you can look at cases like Smith versus Allwright, which arose after Lonnie Smith, who's a black American dentist, was denied the right to vote in a Democratic primary in Texas because of the state's white primary system. So it was a way of ensuring that black Americans couldn't gain political representation because you'd have an all white primary.

That meant that essentially anyone who wasn't white couldn't put themselves forward to be considered or participate.

hite primaries temporarily in: 1944

So rather than holding an open white primary, they would set up all white private clubs and things like that. You'd have earlier civil rights legislation, which is really important too.

you have Civil Rights act in: 1957

But I think the point I'm trying to make is that there's this long legal strategy by black activists, black lawyers in particular, to try and get America to realize what had been set out in the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments and to actually make those laws a reality again. Right.

So the Voting Rights act of: 1965

Liam Heffernan: 00:22:06

I guess that's the kind of point we're sort of building up to, is that these things don't come out of nowhere. There is always, you know, a build up, and that there has to be. And, and in this case, it's basically the hundred years since the Civil War ended.

This, this whole process have been kind of slowly, you know, materializing. But you mentioned, you know, the grassroots activism, you know, tell me about that. And how important was that?

Nicholas Grant: 00:22:31

Yeah, I think it's really key.

And in previous episodes, I've always talked about how the civil rights movement would not have happened if it wasn't for the contributions of ordinary people, young people in particular. Right.

And the key turning point in the civil rights movement is the Greensboro sit in movement, where you see this wave of young, young people getting involved in activism, trying to desegregate lunch counters and other kind of public amenities in the South.

And if you look at, like, I Think that's a key turning point because it signals a kind of really interesting moment where the civil rights movement in the 60s becomes a real mass grassroots movement.

But I'd say in relation to this, a good way of answering that question is thinking about Selma, which people may have seen the film about Selma, but that's a really nice kind of case study in terms of thinking about the importance of grassroots movement. So in Selma is a key kind of battleground in that you have Dallas county in Alabama.

There's a majority black population, but roughly only 2% of that black population has registered to vote. You have a really strong entrenched opposition.

Sheriff Jim Clark, who is kind of policing that situation in a very kind of violent and aggressive way. And you have different kind of civil rights organizations involved. So you have King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference is involved.

Sncc, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, is organizing grassroots civil rights and voting rights campaigns on the ground. And you have a group called the Dallas County Voters League as well, which is kind of organizing locally as well.

And you have kind of important leaders associated with that movement, like Amelia Boynton, Diane Nash, John Lewis, who's the chairman of SNCC at that point.

But what all of that kind of comes together, all of this grassroots work in the film Selma, you kind of get the sense that actually there's a bit of tension there that maybe SNCC activists who'd been working on the ground and building up a local power base kind of almost slightly resented the Southern Christian Leadership Conference coming in and kind of taking the lead. And that's kind of is fairly true. But I think the point is that you have this long established kind of grassroots campaign on the ground.

And this all comes to a head in something that becomes known as bloody Sunday on March 7, where 600 marches led by John Lewis and a Southern Christian Leadership Conference representative, Sia Williams, try and cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. And state troopers attacked them with clubs and whips and tear gas.

And you can see if you kind of put that into Google Images, you can see that as one of the most iconic moments of civil rights protest in terms of how it captured white violence against grassroots resistance. John Lewis is beaten particularly badly. He has his skull fractured.

And troopers then kind of like chase fleeing marches, beating them with clubs that were wrapped with barbed wire and things like that. Incredibly violent response. And that plays out in the media as well.

There's live TV coverage of this in certain ways of kind of following the confrontation. There's big kind of public Outrage that this kind of violence has gone too far.

But my point is, really, is that, like, this is a key flashpoint in the civil rights movement, but it wouldn't happen, wouldn't have happened without that sustained grassroots movement of building a coalition, of trying to get people to register to vote, of trying to get people to march in resistance on this local level.

And that is a key moment that then pushes public consciousness around the morality of civil rights, the morality of voting rights, and particularly puts pressures on politicians and Lyndon Bain Johnson as the president to think about moving quicker on voting rights legislation.

Liam Heffernan: 00:26:12

Yeah.

And, you know, I think there's a really important question here around the role that the media has to play in all of this, because, you know, you've mentioned Selma, you mentioned Birth of a Nation, and, you know, live coverage and the news as well. All of this, they're not just reflecting what's happening. You know, the camera itself is subjective.

How much responsibility did the media have, do you think, in. In shaping public opinion?

Nicholas Grant: 00:26:37

I think. I think it's one of the reasons why the civil rights move and civil rights activists realized this.

They realized they could use the media to show in very vivid ways what black people were confronting when they pushed for civil rights and they pushed for voting rights. And I think that was strategically used. Right.

So I don't think people were actively going in and saying, like, we want, like, a violent flashpoint here, but they knew what the response of white segregationists would be, and they knew how that would play out outside of the south, nationally and internationally, and how that would then put pressure on elected officials at a federal level to say, well, okay, we can talk all we want about the concerns of white Southerners, but surely this isn't acceptable. So that was a kind of key part of a deliberate strategy in terms of Bloody Sunday and the Selma protests. It's kind of.

There was the abc, the American TV network was showing a program of a film called Judgment at Nuremberg at the time about the aftermath of the Second World War and Nazism. And they interrupted the coverage of that to show show and to talk about the breaking news that was going on in Selma.

And it was 48 million viewers, roughly, if you kind of look at what they had.

So to see that irony of, like, thinking about Nazism, the aftermath of the Second World War, of the Holocaust, and then switching to white troopers, state troopers, beating nonviolent black protesters with barbed wire clubs and chasing them off with tear gas and things like that. I don't think the irony wasn't lost on a Lot of people. So I think it's a key moment where people.

And don't forget, like America's fighting the Cold War against the Soviet Union. It's talking about the evils of Soviet totalitarianism.

It becomes a really important diplomatic embarrassment for elected officials in America where you've got the Soviet Union, you're trying to cast yourself as the leader of the free world. The Soviet Union is questioning your kind of history of racial inequality and present of racial inequality.

How can you be the leader of the free world when scenes like this are being projected nationally and internationally?

Liam Heffernan: 00:28:42

All things considered, it only really comes down to what Lyndon B. Johnson at that point really thought about all of this. So what kind of federal response was there?

Nicholas Grant: 00:28:51

Yeah, I always. So when I talk to school students in the UK about the civil rights movement, they always want me to say who was the best president on civil rights.

And I say, well, none of them were particularly good.

But if you want to say one person who did put the interests, his own political interests, in terms of his electoral interests, to one side to push through civil rights and voting rights is probably Lyndon Bain Johnson. That's not to say he was amazing, but he did do kind of important work there. So he was initially cautious.

He needed Southern Democrats, part of his own party, to pass important bills related to his Great Society program. And his pre Selma position was essentially, I can't ask for voting rights this year.

I've already asked for Congress for too much with the Civil Rights act and things like that. But post Selma, the moral imperative I think outweighs the political risks for him.

he makes a speech in March of: 1965

On the civil rights movement, he says their cause must be our cause too, because it's not just black Americans, but in reality all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome. So he's using a slogan of the civil rights movement to say, actually we need to do this now.

And the reason why I said he actually put some of his own electoral and political interests aside for one moment. He knew this would make it difficult for him to get kind of support across his party and support across the aisle for the Great Society programs.

And he knew he was going to lose a lot of Democratic white Southerners in terms of pushing this. But if you look at, if you Google LBJ negotiating, you can see how he intimidated.

He pushed congressmen and senators to get on board with the Voting Rights Act. So he traded things like he promised the appointments of judges if they voted in the right way.

He did kind of things like holding up federal subsidies for agriculture in key states unless the elected official voted for the voting rights movement.

th of August,: 1965

And he kind of talked about it as a triumph of freedom and a huge victory that was won on the battlefield. So, I mean, I'm always cautious about giving too much credit to presidents in terms of the civil rights movement, But I think this.

And we also got to remember that that comes from the grassroots struggle. He wouldn't have done anything if. If Selma hadn't happened and played out in the way it did, I don't think. But he did kind of harness the.

The power that he had to push Southern Democrats to go with him on the Voting Rights Act. Right. And to get enough support for that bill.

Liam Heffernan: 00:31:40

So we've covered the events, we've covered the circumstances and everything leading up to it. So what exactly is the Voting Rights act and what did it legislate?

Nicholas Grant: 00:31:51

Yeah, the key part of the Voting Rights Act. And this is where we need Emma Long on the podcast with her legal history mind.

But the key kind of aspect of it is Section 2, which prohibited voting discrimination anywhere in the U.S. it was a nationwide ban on voting prescription. It provided the basis for litigation against discriminatory practices relating to voting.

And a kind of key quote from that is, no voting qualification shall be imposed in a manner which results in a denial or an abridgment. So that Section two is kind of really, really important. It's still active today, although has been weakened by recent Supreme Court decisions.

And then section 5 is really important as well. It talks about preclearance.

So preclearance said that states with the history of discrimination had to get federal permission before making any voting change.

So even moving a polling place just one block or changing the hours of voting, if they were going to change anything to do with the procedures around vote change, they had to get clearance from the federal government in order to make that change.

Liam Heffernan: 00:33:04

But what was the definition of a history of discrimination? Because that's everyone, right?

Nicholas Grant: 00:33:09

Yeah, effectively. Right.

So effectively, anywhere that systemically denied voting rights and the access to the polls of African Americans and Obviously looking at the south in this instance, but it was a really important framework to have legislatively to think about voter suppression across the United States as a whole.

So it just meant that like you couldn't do any kind of sneaky backdoor tricks or intimidation or gerrymandering or whatever it was to try and make sure that you are kind of limiting the voting rights of minority groups in particular or any particular group.

eral government, like between: 1965

So federal forces could directly register voters by bypassing local officials could monitor elections.

And in the first week of the Voting Rights act passing, federal examiners registered more voters than local forces had registered in the previous two years.

So basically federal control of that system of the ability to register to vote and enforcement like giving clear consequences if the voting rights of individuals were tampered with or made more difficult. So yeah, it had a huge kind of impact and a very immediate impact.

icans who could vote prior to: 1965

So it had this big kind of immediate impact in terms of changing the landscape in terms of who had voting rights and who didn't.

Liam Heffernan: 00:35:07

And that's incredible.

attempts up until: 2013

And we, you know, we're still talking today in, you know, even as recently as the last election in 24, about, you know, voter suppression and these state level laws that are kind of bypassing things like the Voting Rights act to make it as difficult as possible for, for non whites to vote.

Nicholas Grant: 00:35:47

such a live issue is that in: 2013

And this decision which was passed by the Supreme Court effectively nullified that pre clearance provision that I was just talking about. So it was a 5, 4 decision in favor of getting, of gutting parts of the Voting Rights Act.

So the Chief Justice Robis said in that ruling that the country has changed, and Congress must ensure legislation speaks to different conditions. And essentially it said, we don't really need to.

We've gone so far now, actually away from these moments of systemic disenfranchisement and racial injustice, that it's unnecessary to kind of insist that states have to kind of get federal pre clearance if they want to kind of change anything related that will affect people's voting rights. So it's a massive issue. Right, because you were just saying, like, how effective that had been, and now that doesn't kind of exist in the same way.

And within hours of that ruling, Texas announced voter ID laws. Within weeks of that, North Carolina passed various restrictions on how people could vote and access the polls.

By: 2016

All of those things would have been prevented with pre clearance, but after Shelby county versus Holder, they're no longer in place. And that's where you kind of see a renewed movement for voter suppression. And that often plays out in racialized ways.

Liam Heffernan: 00:37:40

If these issues are still happening, if states are still able to circumvent it to discriminate in any way against black Americans from voting, then surely the Voting Rights act is not sufficient.

Nicholas Grant: 00:37:56

Yeah, absolutely. I think that this was a travesty in terms of thinking about people's civil liberties.

And then we've seen subsequently issues to do with debates about kind of free and fair elections. I mean, obviously you have the narrative from Trump that he's being discriminated against in elections.

But the reality, if you look at the data and statistics, is that voter suppression has only kind of been amplified. So there's mass support now for, like, state voter ID requirements. There's huge opposition to any kind of federal meddling in elections processes.

m and things like that. Since: 2010

Voter turnout has declined by 7%. Now, there could be lots of reasons for that, but I think literally being able to access the polls might be one of those things as well.

So, yeah, there's voter roll purges, exact match laws where, like, the match on the voter registration with your ID has to be exact. And even if there's one kind of letter out of place, there's a problem. There's lots of ways in which.

Which voting rights are being eroded currently in the United States. And this is very much kind of an ongoing fight.

There is something called the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement act, which John Lewis is now sadly deceased.

But referencing him in terms of his role in the struggle in Selma for the Voting Rights act to try and, like, rectify some of those issues that have that Shelby county vs. Holder brought to the fore, I think it's particularly symbolic and reminds us that, like, those battles of the 60s, those things that were won in the 60s can be taken away, and there needs to be kind of new battles to kind of push back against that as well.

Liam Heffernan: 00:39:43

And I think it just sort of highlights how, you know, laws are still only a product of their time and, you know, they need to be amended and reviewed, and they need to evolve as circumstances change and as, I guess, challenges emerge that maybe weren't foreseen at the time that the act was passed.

And I guess that's part of it, you know, because I know I've sort of bashed how the Voting Rights act probably isn't fit for purpose, but 60 years later, they. You can't expect the same piece of law to be as effective as it was when it was first brought in. Right.

Nicholas Grant: 00:40:15

Yeah.

I think we're operating in a very kind of different reality, but I think it's such an important and long, thoughtful piece of legislation and did have teeth.

It did have an acknowledgement that in order to account for these historical and systemic issues of disenfranchisement, you actually needed to put resources and forces and consequences behind that in order to ensure that people that we didn't kind of backslide or America didn't backslide.

And now in the age of Trump, with the second Trump administration, you can see the consequences of not seeing that through and of kind of the complacency about it. Right. As well, where voter suppression is only progressing and becoming more. More of an issue.

And that you have actually the delegitimizing of the electoral process as well, which I think is really dangerous and really worrying. So I think we're going to think about the legacy of the Voting Rights Act.

It's that legacy of continuous struggle and the need to try and think about how do you react to voter suppression in this current moment, and to think about the resonances of how civil rights activists pushed for that case in the 60s and in the decades before that as well.

Liam Heffernan: 00:41:34

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's a good place to wrap up. Obviously, there's so many more conversations that need to be had around this.

And I mean, Nick, as always, I'm grateful that you joined me on the podcast to talk about all of these issues for anyone that's listening to this and you want to find out more and I would strongly encourage that you do. We've left links to everything that we've discussed in the show notes, so go and check all of that out.

Nick, any final thoughts and where can people connect with you?

Nicholas Grant: 00:42:03

I don't have any profound final thoughts, but I'm always happy to kind of people to get in touch. If you want to find my email, you can Google Nick Grant UEA and you'll find that I'm not on social media anymore, which I'm quite enjoying.

But yeah, please do get in touch.

And I'm really invested in thinking about how we teach about the history of the civil Rights movement in quite narrowly defined ways in the uk, maybe in the us and that actually we need to have broader conversations and to complicate some of those narratives because they do really matter today.

And hopefully this episode's shown that those discussions about the Voting Rights act in the 60s resonate and rhyme in certain ways today, in ways that I think we all should kind of be interested in. And it's really a monument both to, like the power of democracy, but also its fragility as well. So it's a little bit of a warning there too.

Liam Heffernan: 00:42:53

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Nick, and a pleasure as always to have you on the show.

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