Simpkins: Remembering the Voting Rights Act

The Center for a Better South's John Simpkins offered this report from a weekend conference in Selma that celebrated the 40th anniversary of the passage of the Voting Rights Act:

As I sped along the road from Selma to Montgomery Saturday, with the Edmund Pettus Bridge in my rearview mirror, I couldn’t help but reflect on how much the South has changed. The days of state-sponsored violence towards voters are gone, although some of the perpetrators of that violence have yet to see the error of their ways. For example, listen to this segment on former Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark from the August 5 edition of All Things Considered.

Despite these decidedly retrograde impulses, the newest edition of the New South is likely to be marked by a sharp increase in population and, hopefully, accompanying economic growth. The Census Bureau projects that the population of the South will increase by 41 million people in the next 25 years. That translates into an additional 17 electoral votes. Those who would argue for forgetting the South in presidential politics would do well to consider how a candidate could win office while conceding 190 electoral votes before the race even begins.

Instead, it is up to progressives to make the South competitive again. Central to this redoubled effort are the protections of Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which requires certain areas, mostly in the South, to clear changes to electoral arrangements with the Attorney General or the District Court for the District of Columbia. As the Solid South becomes browner and more populated, the preclearance mechanism of Section 5 will be critical to assuring fairness and transparency in voting. The South has come a long way from the heyday of the Jim Clark’s of the world. But it still can do better.

Another view from ThinkSouth's Bob Davis of The Anniston Star.