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Standing on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 2017, photographer William Abranowicz was struck by the weight of historical memory at this hallowed site of one of the civil rights movement's defining episodes: 1965's \"Bloody Sunday,\" when Alabama police officers attacked peaceful marchers. To Abranowicz's eye, Selma seemed relatively unchanged from its apperance in the photographs Walker Evans made there in the 1930s. That, coupled with an awareness of renewed voter suppression efforts at state and federal levels, inspired Abranowicz to explore the living legacy of the civil and voting rights movement through photographing locations, landscapes, and individuals associated with the struggle, from Rosa Parks and Harry Belafonte to the barn where Emmett Till was murdered. The result is This Far and No Further , a collection of photographs from Abranowicz's journey through the American South. Through symbolism, metaphor, and history, he unearths extraordinary stories of brutality, heroism, sacrifice, and redemption hidden within ordinary American landscapes, underscoring the crucial necessity of defending-and exercising-our right to vote at this tenuous moment for American democracy.

Whether voting is racially polarized has for the last generation been the linchpin question in vote dilution cases under the core, nationally applicable provision of the Voting Rights Act. The polarization test is supposed to be clear-cut (\"manageable\"), diagnostic of liability, and free of strong racial assumptions. Using evidence from a random sample of vote dilution cases, we argue that these objectives have not been realized in practice and, further, that they cannot be realized under current conditions. The roots of the problem are twofold: (1) the widely shared belief that polarization determinations should be grounded on votes cast in actual elections; and (2) normative disagreement, often covert, about the meaning of racial vote dilution. We argue that the principal normative theories of vote dilution have conflicting implications for the racial-polarization test. We also show that votes are related only contingently to the political preferences that the polarization inquiry is supposed to reveal and, further, that the estimation of candidates' vote shares by racial group from ballots cast in actual elections depends on racial-homogeneity assumptions similar to those that the Supreme Court has disavowed. Our analysis casts serious doubt on the notion—promoted in dicta by the Supreme Court and supported by prominent commentators—that courts sfwuld establish bright-line vote-share cutoffs for \"legally significant\" racial polarization. The courts would do better to screen vote dilution claims using either evidence of preference polarization derived from surveys or nonpreference evidence of minority political incorporation.

This book is a call to investigate the history of federal oversight to secure and preserve black Americans' voting rights over a ninety-five-year interregnum. Holloway confronts this historical conundrum and offers keen observations about voting manipulations and electoral abuse by both government incumbents and private actors.

The transformation of the American South--from authoritarian to democratic rule--is the most important political development since World War II. It has re-sorted voters into parties, remapped presidential elections, and helped polarize Congress. Most important, it is the final step in America's democratization.Paths Out of Dixieilluminates this sea change by analyzing the democratization experiences of Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina. Robert Mickey argues that Southern states, from the 1890s until the early 1970s, constituted pockets of authoritarian rule trapped within and sustained by a federal democracy. These enclaves--devoted to cheap agricultural labor and white supremacy--were established by conservative Democrats to protect their careers and clients. From the abolition of the whites-only Democratic primary in 1944 until the national party reforms of the early 1970s, enclaves were battered and destroyed by a series of democratization pressures from inside and outside their borders. Drawing on archival research, Mickey traces how Deep South rulers--dissimilar in their internal conflict and political institutions--varied in their responses to these challenges. Ultimately, enclaves differed in their degree of violence, incorporation of African Americans, and reconciliation of Democrats with the national party. These diverse paths generated political and economic legacies that continue to reverberate today. Focusing on enclave rulers, their governance challenges, and the monumental achievements of their adversaries,Paths Out of Dixieshows how the struggles of the recent past have reshaped the South and, in so doing, America's political development.

Passed in 1965 during the height of the Civil Rights movement, the Voting Rights Act (VRA) changed the face of the American electorate, dramatically increasing minority voting, especially in the South. While portions of the Act are permanent, certain provisions were set to expire in 2007. Reauthorization of these provisions passed by a wide margin in the House, and unanimously in the Senate, but the lopsided tally hid a deep and growing conflict. The Most Fundamental Right is an effort to understand the debate over the Act and its role in contemporary American democracy. Is the VRA the cornerstone of civil rights law that prevents unfair voting practices, or is it an anachronism that no longer serves American democracy? Divided into three sections, the book utilizes a point/counterpoint approach. Section 1 explains the legal and political context of the Act, providing important background for what follows; Section 2 pairs three debates concerning specific provisions or applications of the Act; while Section 3 offers commentaries on the previous chapters from attorneys with widely divergent viewpoints.

In recent years, scholars have come to a general agreement about the relationship between partisan gerrymandering and racial redistricting. Drawing districts that contain a majority of minority voters, as is often required by the Voting Rights Act, is said to help minority voters in those districts but hurt the Democratic Party more broadly. This Article argues that this familiar claim is based on a mistaken assumption about how redistricters can best manipulate districts for partisan gain—an assumption grounded in the idea that all voters can be thought of as either Democrats or Republicans. Relaxing this assumption, and acknowledging that voters come in diverse ideological types, we highlight the fact that the optimal partisan gerrymandering strategy is quite different from the pack-and-crack strategy that is pervasive in the literature. Understanding this optimal strategy leads to a second insight—that the Voting Rights Act constrains Republicans' partisan ambitions, not Democrats', as is typically thought. We conclude by discussing some implications for the future of the Voting Rights Act and the next round of decennial redistricting.

This book explores congressional redistricting, the relevance of the Voting Rights Act, and the legal concept of racial purpose, focusing on the role race and racism played in the Texas redistricting process and the state's 2011Voter Identification Law. The author makes a case for the use of mixed-methods research techniques in litigation research.

Do street-level bureaucrats discriminate in the services they provide to constituents? We use a field experiment to measure differential information provision about voting by local election administrators in the United States. We contact over 7,000 election officials in 48 states who are responsible for providing information to voters and implementing voter ID laws. We find that officials provide different information to potential voters of different putative ethnicities. Emails sent from Latino aliases are significantly less likely to receive any response from local election officials than non-Latino white aliases and receive responses of lower quality. This raises concerns about the effect of voter ID laws on access to the franchise and about bias in the provision of services by local bureaucrats more generally.

A groundbreaking history of the Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Eras that reveals the importance of biracial coalitions The Reconstruction era marked a huge political leap for African Americans, who rapidly went from the status of slaves to voters and officeholders. Yet this hard-won progress lasted only a few decades. Ultimately a \"second reconstruction\"—associated with the civil rights movement and the Voting Rights Act—became necessary. How did the first reconstruction fail so utterly, setting the stage for the complete disenfranchisement of Southern black voters, and why did the second succeed? These are among the questions Richard M. Valelly answers in this fascinating history. The fate of black enfranchisement, he argues, has been closely intertwined with the strengths and constraints of our political institutions. Valelly shows how effective biracial coalitions have been the key to success and incisively traces how and why political parties and the national courts either rewarded or discouraged the formation of coalitions. Revamping our understanding of American race relations, The Two Reconstructions brilliantly explains a puzzle that lies at the heart of America's development as a political democracy.

Objectives. To investigate the impact of the US Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 on Black and Black versus White infant deaths in Jim Crow states. Methods. Using data from 1959 to 1980 and 2017 to 2021, we applied difference-in-differences methods to quantify differential pre–post VRA changes in infant deaths in VRA-exposed versus unexposed counties, controlling for population size and social, economic, and health system characteristics. VRA-exposed counties, identified by Section 4, were subject to government interventions to remove existing racist voter suppression policies. Results. Black infant deaths in VRA-exposed counties decreased by an average of 11.4 (95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.7, 21.0) additional deaths beyond the decrease experienced by unexposed counties between the pre-VRA period (1959–1965) and the post-VRA period (1966–1970). This translates to 6703 (95% CI = 999.6, 12 348) or 17.5% (95% CI = 3.1%, 28.1%) fewer deaths than would have been experienced in the absence of the VRA. The equivalent differential changes were not significant among the White or total population. Conclusions. Passage of the VRA led to pronounced reductions in Black infant deaths in Southern counties subject to government intervention because these counties had particularly egregious voter suppression practices. ( Am J Public Health. 2024;114(3):300–308. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2023.307518 )