The Stolen Vote: Black Voting Rights in America

The 13th Amendment (1865) abolished slavery. The 14th Amendment (1868) granted citizenship and equal protection to all persons born in the United States. The 15th Amendment (1870) prohibited denying the right to vote based on "race, color, or previous condition of servitude." Three constitutional amendments in five years — the most significant expansion of democratic rights in American history.

During Reconstruction, with federal troops in the South enforcing these rights, Black men voted in extraordinary numbers. Over 2,000 Black men held elected office during Reconstruction — senators, congressmen, state legislators, sheriffs, judges, school board members. Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce served as U.S. Senators from Mississippi. Mississippi sent more Black men to Congress during Reconstruction than it would send in the following 130 years combined.

When federal troops withdrew in 1877 — as part of the Compromise of 1877 that handed Rutherford Hayes the presidency — Southern states immediately began dismantling this. Within twenty years, Black voter registration in Mississippi had fallen from 190,000 to fewer than 1,000.

The 15th Amendment said the vote could not be denied based on race. Southern states complied with the letter of the amendment and obliterated its meaning through a toolkit of race-neutral mechanisms that were, in practice, exclusively applied to Black voters.

Medgar Evers was the NAACP's field secretary for Mississippi. His work, from 1954 until his assassination in 1963, consisted largely of driving through rural Mississippi encouraging Black residents to register to vote and documenting what happened to those who tried. What happened, routinely, was that they were fired from their jobs, evicted from their land, denied credit, beaten, and killed.

In 1955, Lamar Smith was shot dead on the courthouse lawn in Brookhaven, Mississippi in broad daylight in front of dozens of witnesses. He had been helping Black voters obtain absentee ballots. No one was ever charged. Two weeks later, Emmett Till was murdered. That same month, the Rev. George Lee was killed after leading a voter registration drive. The killers were never prosecuted.

Evers himself was shot in his driveway by Byron De La Beckwith on June 12, 1963 — the same night President Kennedy addressed the nation on civil rights. Beckwith was tried twice in the 1960s; all-white juries deadlocked both times. He was not convicted until 1994 — 31 years after the murder. He died in prison in 2001.

On March 7, 1965, 600 people led by 25-year-old John Lewis and Hosea Williams marched from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama to demand voting rights. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge — named for a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan — they were met by Alabama state troopers and a Sheriff's posse on horseback. The troopers charged into the crowd with clubs and tear gas. John Lewis's skull was fractured. Amelia Boynton Robinson was beaten unconscious.

ABC interrupted Judgment at Nuremberg — a film about Nazi war crimes — to broadcast footage of the attack. The juxtaposition was not lost on American viewers. 48 million people watched. Within days, President Johnson addressed Congress and called for immediate passage of a voting rights act, uttering the phrase of the Civil Rights Movement: "We shall overcome."

Eight days later, 25,000 people completed the Selma to Montgomery march under federal protection. Five months later, Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibited discriminatory voting practices and, critically, required states with a history of discrimination to get federal "preclearance" before changing any voting law. Section 5 preclearance applied to states and counties where less than 50% of the voting-age population had registered or voted in 1964 — covering most of the Deep South.

The results were immediate and dramatic. Black voter registration in Mississippi went from 6.7% in 1965 to 59.8% in 1967. In Alabama, from 19.3% to 51.6%. In Georgia, from 27.4% to 52.6%. By 1970, Black voter registration in the South had increased by over 1 million people. The number of Black elected officials in the South went from fewer than 100 in 1965 to over 700 by 1970, and over 5,000 by 1980.

Southern states and counties immediately began looking for workarounds: annexing white suburbs to dilute Black majorities, switching from district elections to at-large elections, moving polling places without notice, purging voter rolls. The preclearance requirement blocked most of these. Between 1965 and 2013, the Justice Department objected to over 1,000 proposed voting changes in covered jurisdictions.

In Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that the formula used to determine which states required preclearance was outdated. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that "things have changed dramatically" in the South. The majority did not strike down preclearance itself — only the formula, knowing Congress would not update it.

The dissent by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was direct: "Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet."

Within 24 hours of the decision, Texas announced it would implement a strict photo ID law that had been blocked under preclearance. North Carolina announced it would begin implementing a sweeping elections bill. Alabama announced it would require photo ID. Mississippi moved forward with its own ID law. These were not coincidences — they were laws that had been prepared in advance, waiting for the moment preclearance ended.

The 2020 election saw the highest voter turnout in American history — and among the highest Black voter turnout ever recorded. In Georgia, unprecedented Black voter turnout delivered the state to Joe Biden and elected two Democratic senators, flipping the Senate. In Arizona, Navajo Nation and Black voters in Maricopa County were decisive.

In the months following the 2020 election, Republican-controlled legislatures in 19 states passed 34 laws making it harder to vote. Georgia's SB 202 made it a crime to give food or water to voters standing in line. It limited drop boxes. It reduced early voting hours in counties with large Black populations. It empowered the state legislature to override county election boards — the same county boards that had resisted pressure to "find" votes in 2020.

The targeting of measures used disproportionately by Black voters — Sunday voting (connected to "Souls to the Polls" church drives), mobile voting units, extended early voting — was not incidental. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that new voter ID laws reduced Black turnout by an average of 8.8 percentage points compared to 3.6 points for white voters.

The United States is one of the few democracies in the world that permanently strips voting rights from people convicted of felonies — even after they have completed their sentence. 4.6 million Americans as of 2022 are disenfranchised due to felony convictions — more people than the entire population of New Zealand. In some states, disenfranchisement is permanent unless the governor grants individual clemency.

Given that Black Americans are incarcerated at nearly 5 times the rate of white Americans — a disparity rooted in policing and sentencing policy, not crime rates — felon disenfranchisement functions as a voting suppression mechanism with racial effects built in. In Florida in 2018, voters passed Amendment 4 restoring voting rights to 1.4 million people with felony convictions. The Republican legislature immediately passed a law requiring them to first pay all fines, fees, and restitution — which for most meant they remained disenfranchised. A federal court called it an unconstitutional poll tax. The 11th Circuit Court reversed that ruling.

The 13th Amendment's exception clause — "except as punishment for a crime" — permitted the continuation of slavery as punishment. Felon disenfranchisement is the same logic applied to the ballot: the crime exception that swallows the right.

In the 2020 election, voters in predominantly Black neighborhoods in Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona, and other states waited in line an average of 45 minutes longer than voters in predominantly white neighborhoods. A study by MIT found that Black voters were 74% more likely to wait more than 30 minutes to vote than white voters.

This is not a resource allocation accident. In Maricopa County, Arizona in 2016, election officials cut the number of polling places from 200 to 60. In Jefferson County, Alabama, the DMV office — the primary location for obtaining the ID required to vote — was closed in 2015 after a new voter ID law passed, along with 31 other DMV offices, all in counties with large Black populations. Officials said budget cuts required the closures. The closures were reversed after public outcry, but only after the voter ID law's implementation.

The mechanics of suppression have changed. The architecture has not. In 1901, a literacy test administered by a white registrar was the mechanism. In 2024, it is a polling place that serves 5,000 voters with two machines, or a voter roll purge that removes people who didn't vote in the last two elections, or an ID requirement that accepts a gun license but not a student ID.

The pattern is now 155 years long and unmistakable. When Black Americans gain meaningful access to the ballot — 1870, 1965, 2008 — the institutions that benefit from their exclusion respond with new mechanisms of suppression. The first suppression took 90 years to partially undo. The second suppression began within 24 hours of the Supreme Court's permission.

The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act — which would restore the preclearance mechanism gutted in Shelby County — passed the House in 2021. It has never received a Senate vote. The For the People Act, which would have established automatic voter registration, same-day registration, and national early voting standards, also passed the House and died in the Senate. The Senate filibuster, originally used primarily to block civil rights legislation, was invoked to prevent voting rights legislation from reaching a vote.

John Lewis, who had his skull fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 fighting for the right to vote, served in Congress for 33 years and spent the last years of his life warning that the rights he had nearly died for were being dismantled. He died in July 2020. The voting rights bill named for him has not passed.