Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “Voting Rights Act”
got an email last night from a woman who waited five hours to vote in Arizona. Five hours. We don’t know how many thousands of people didn’t get to cast their ballots yesterday in Arizona because they couldn’t afford to wait that long. Scenes on cable news last night showed hundreds of people in line at11:30pm in Phoenix – more than four …
On the 50th Anniversary of the Voting Rights Act
Fifty years ago today, after a protracted civil-rights struggle that was both conciliatory and militant, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibiting all states from impeding or denying African Americans the right to vote. The legislation also strengthened existing antidiscrimination laws and gave new authority to the U.S. Attorney General to prosecute offending states.
Reflecting on the half-century since the passage of the VRA, Leid Stories observes the many ways in which both the letter and intent of the act have been violated. Moreover, the question central to the VRA and several related legal cases remains unanswered: Are African Americans citizens of the United States?
Here’s a little quiz you won’t find on the LSATs: Which Supreme Court justice called a recent ruling by the court a “threat to American democracy”? And what decision was it? A. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote it of the Citizens United decision, which armed corporations with the political free speech rights of human beings. B. Justice Sonia Sotomayor included …
I tried! In my capacity as a member of the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Board of Directors (CCR), I traveled to Selma on Friday to attend the induction of Arthur Kinoy and William Kunstler, two of the founding lawyers of CCR, into the Selma National Voting Rights Museum. And even though I knew that I would have to endure Obama’s …
I hate to spoil a happy ending. The movie “Selma,”like this week’s commemorations of Martin Luther King Jr.’s march from Selma, Ala., 50 years ago, celebrates America’s giant leap from apartheid. Half a century ago Alabama state troopers and a mob of racist thugs beat African-Americans and others as they marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, demanding no more than the …
