Kevin Morris came to WCU to talk about the 60th anniversary of the passage of the Voting Rights Act on Oct. 20 in the UC Theater, where over 90 students came to hear him.
Morris is a senior research fellow and voting policy scholar with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Democracy Program at New York University.
The Brennan Center has been researching the causes and the effects of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
“He’s been published in the most prestigious journals in political science and his research has been covered by news outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN,” said Chris Cooper, a professor of political science and public affairs at WCU. “He’s testified before Congress and he has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court.”
Morris was invited by the Phil and Connie Haire Institute of Public Policy, which “aims to empower the Western North Carolina region to effectively manage real policy problems by mobilizing students, community leaders, faculty, and citizens to discuss and develop viable policy options to create more effective policies,” according to their website.
“The work is explicitly non partisan, student centered, and tries to rely on not vibes or hunches, but based on data and empirical evidence,” Cooper said.
Morris talked about the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was an act that outlawed the discriminatory voting practices used in southern states after the Civil War.
According to Morris, after the Reconstruction era, a time period where much of the U.S. was focused on helping with the legal, social, and political changes after the abolition of slavery and reintegration of the Confederate states, the government withdrew from enforcing new amendments to the Constitution.
The three main amendments that were abandoned were the 13th through the 15th amendment.
“The federal government really walks away from protecting the civil and political rights of black Americans until well into the 20th century,” Morris said.
This gave southern states the ability to create laws that didn’t explicitly discriminate on voters because of race, but could make it a lot harder for them to be able to vote. Examples of this were the literacy tests given out of the grandfather clause.
“The grandfather clause said that if your grandfather was not eligible to vote, you cannot vote either,” Morris said. “The words ‘black American’ do not show up in the text of that law, but everyone knows who it’s falling on.”
These laws were not changed until the 1940s after states are given the green light to kick black voters out of the primary election.
“They changed that in 1945 in the Supreme Court, and they (the justices) say the primary election is too important,” Morris said. “It’s too important to who is actually eventually elected, so you have to let everybody participate in the primaries.”
According to Morris, many historians believe this change in thinking by the Supreme Court as the beginning of the Supreme Court taking civil rights seriously.
These laws and racialized violence on black voters stop a lot of black voters from wanting to vote. In 1959, 25% of black southerners were registered to vote.
After realizing this, the Supreme Court began to pass a series of civil and voting rights laws, starting in 1957, then revising them in 1960, with the final Civil Rights Act being passed in 1964.
The acts from 1957 and 1960 try to make voting easier for black southerners, but they don’t work very well.
“The 1957 act made it easier for the federal government to sue the states, but litigation only approach is very slow and doesn’t work well.’ Morris said. “The 1960 act goes a little bit further and has people convince a federal judge there is a problem, but it relies too much on Southern federal judges.”
After more protests like the march in Alabama in 1965, Lyndon Johnson, the president at the time, addressed the issue of voter rights to Congress.
“He stands up and he demands that Congress send him a bill to address the problem of race discrimination in voting,” Morris said.
This creates the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which makes the states have to prove to the federal government that their voting and election law are not going to have a racially discriminatory effect.
There are more changes to the act that help out other communities than black Americans, like the 1975 changes that extended it past language, which helped Jackson County’s Cherokee population.
The Department of Justice stopped 85% of election laws because of they would have a racially discriminatory effect between 1965 and 2013.
In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down the formula used to determine if election laws are discriminatory before they are applied, which pauses the law.
With the pause on the Voting Rights Act of 1965, more restrictive laws come out of different states for voting, like the Texas Voter ID bill, which makes hunting licenses usable as voter ID but not student ID cards.
“A number of groups sue Texas, but it takes all the way from 2013 to 2018 for this law to be struck down,” Morris said. “The pre-clearance process was way more efficient and cost a lot less money.”
Not only has Texas created more voting laws, but multiple other states have introduced voting laws that have made it more restrictive for people to be able to vote. One of those states is North Carolina.
Morris ended with a quote from former president Johnson.
“Our problem today is that we might disagree on everything, but the American problem is making sure that even when we disagree, we can all participate in democracy and make sure our voices are heard,” Morris said.
Now it is up to future lawmakers to help get the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to where it was before.
“This fight is ongoing,” Morris said. “It’s going to take all of us joining together to do it.”
