Double Reverse Discrimination

Abstract

Double Reverse Discrimination Steven F. Lawson (bio) J. Morgan Kousser. Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. 590 pp. Figures, tables, notes, bibliography, and index. $65.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper). In their long and torturous struggle for racial equality following the end of slavery, African Americans counted the right to vote as essential to winning full freedom. Reconstruction gave newly emancipated black southerners their first opportunity to cast ballots and elect members of their own race to public office. As participants in biracial governments, they helped bring to the war-devastated South public school systems, internal improvements, and progressive state constitutions. However, their pride of accomplishment proved short-lived as Reconstruction gave way to Redemption, and by the turn of the twentieth century, white southern conservatives regained political control and disfranchised most of the African-American electorate. Nevertheless, the legacy of this pioneering suffrage experience did not die. Regaining the franchise became critical to restoring freedom and full citizenship. Blacks challenged their loss of voting rights in the courts but to no avail. In 1876, a year before the last Union troops withdrew from the South, the Supreme Court decided that the federal government lacked the power to protect citizens from intimidation and violence in state and local elections. 1 Two decades later, while the high tribunal in Plessy v. Ferguson upheld racial segregation, the justices also validated poll taxes and literacy tests that white southern officials implemented to disqualify blacks from voting. 2 With the ballot central to their quest for freedom, black plaintiffs did not give up on the courts. Their persistence paid off in 1944, when the Supreme Court outlawed the Democratic white primary that excluded blacks from the only meaningful election in the South. 3 This judicial triumph stimulated black voter registration, but legal rulings by themselves did not crack the wall of white supremacist resistance that arose in the 1950s to keep the black electorate from expanding. Not until civil rights protests in the 1960s forced the federal government to respond positively did Congress pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This potent piece of legislation finally led to the elimination of the remaining legal obstacles to black [End Page 477] voter registration and provided the federal government, largely through the Justice Department, with the necessary power to enforce the law. The passage and enforcement of the Voting Rights Act guaranteed the reenfranchisement of the majority of African Americans and sparked the election of thousands of black officeholders in the South. The successes of the Second Reconstruction have exceeded those of the first and have proven more durable. In contrast to the post-Civil War period, until recently, the Supreme Court in the post-Civil Rights era generally supported black political empowerment. Starting with a series of rulings in 1969, the high bench interpreted the Voting Rights Law to cover not only registration and voting but also methods of conducting elections. 4 The court recognized that state legislatures might use redistricting to establish boundary lines that reduced or eliminated the possibility that black voters could elect candidates they favored. Furthermore, local governments could reach the same end by holding elections at large instead of by districts. The justices considered these and other arrangements examples of improper vote dilution if they were adopted with a racially discriminatory intent or produced a racially biased effect. Congress agreed with this interpretation as it renewed the act three times in 1970, 1975, and 1982 with the expansive court decisions in mind. As a result, a growing number of legislative districts in the South for state and national offices were drawn with a majority-black population, thereby promoting the election of a larger number of minority representatives than ever before. However, the legislative and judicial consensus favorable to minority voting rights came under assault in the mid 1990s. Opponents of affirmative action, including some liberals who had originally supported passage of the Voting Rights Act, contended that lawmakers did not have a constitutional obligation to fashion electoral procedures that would effectively increase the chance of electing minority officeholders, just as they could not use race to...