The Voting Rights Act: 30 years later

A black man walks into a county store and says he wants to vote. A row of hostile white rednecks glare at him as he lays his ballot on the table. He turns around and leaves.

Peter Klopfer, professor of zoology, says this scenario characterized the Orange County voting process 30 years ago. He and his wife were volunteer poll-watchers in neighboring Orange, until they too, got "intimidated sufficiently," and gave it up.

"I can still show you the bullet holes on the side of my house. There were several nights where we didn't dare sit near windows," he remembers, eyes wide. "This was a war zone in the early 60s.

"In our precinct, and true in most of the rural precincts, voting was done in county stores. You walk the length of the store in front of guys lounging in rocking chairs with beer cans in front of the stoves, you lay your ballot down on the table and make your mark. No booth or anything in front of these rows of crackers watching you," Klopfer says. Many couldn't handle the pressure and the fear of voting. "Sure you have the right to vote guaranteed by the Congress, but not many people had the nerve. The Voting Rights Act didn't change things here," Klopfer says.

Passed by Congress in 1965, it took time for the Voting Rights Act to have an impact--for minorities to vote confidentially and gain equal representation. This year, the Supreme Court marked the act's 30th anniversary by challenging the original intent of the legislation, some say nullifying it. Debates now rage over redrawn congressional districts, minority voting and a possible re-segregation of society.

"It's probably time, 30 years after the Voting Rights Act to actually have people, both state and federal government officials and citizens, sit down and evaluate the impact of 30 years, and see what new kind of procedures and legislation might be needed to continue to support the basic values and principles of the Voting Rights Act," says Robert Korstad, a Duke public policy professor.

Recent debate has focused on whether the Justice Department's current interpretation of the Voting Rights Act really is constitutional; that is, should states be asked to draw voting districts that help minorities gain representation in Congress? Many oppose the notion, arguing that any type of race-based decision making is a step backward.

"The Voting Rights Act was being turned into a tool for racial gerrymandering of districts. It was turned into a tool for racial segregation," says Benjamin Griffith, a voting rights litigation attorney in Cleveland, Mississippi. "Redistricting plans that were being pressed forward by the plaintiffs were gerrymandering districts in such a way that race was being used as the sole predominant determinant for where the district lines are being drawn, and one of the greatest concerns I had was that race was being used to draw lines of separatism as opposed [those] of integration."

"We feel that it's harmful to everybody--black and white--because it divides and polarizes races on the grounds of color and race. We think it's a balkanizing of the state," says Robinson Everett, a Duke law professor, who will argue for the plaintiff. "It basically separates people on the grounds of race, and we think it's unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment's equal protection. We don't think the Voting Rights Act either authorizes or requires it.

"The Voting Rights Act was designed to ensure that any barriers for registration have been eliminated. For the most part, in the 12th district, there's a higher percentage of African Americans registered than whites."

Everett argues that district lines should be drawn on more traditional principles so that the districts will be compact; the people voting will live in the same community, and therefore have the same community interests--county lines and city lines should be respected, he says. That way everything would look nice and neat, and as Griffith adds, states wouldn't wind up with districts that "look like a bug splattered on a windshield."

Oddly-shaped districts have been a part of the American electoral landscape for years, as they have long been a source of coalition-building--the districts were drawn to help serve some type of common interest. Now, in light of recent court rulings, 17 black-majority districts in the South are vulnerable to change. As per Justice Department prescription, the Southern states covered in the Voting Rights Act have been forced to span miles of terrain in search of black voters. District 12 does just that, linking residents of Raleigh-Durham, Greensboro, Burlington, Winston-Salem and Charlotte.

"When you have bizarre districts that run the length of a county, that pick up pockets of a minority race like a string of pearls, you are re-segregating, as opposed to integrating. And when you engage in separatism in the name of race, that's a great leap backwards," Griffith says.

Proponents of such districts argue that people like Griffith are not looking back far enough into history.

"People who are opposed to some of these redistricting plans are not mindful of the historical necessity for finding measures to ensure minority representation and tactics to minimize the electoral strength of minority voters in the past," says Duke's Korstad. "They have a set of principles that seem to be of the moment, and not necessarily very deep seated. If you wanted to look at manipulation of the political system through gerrymandering and political districting, I think you could find a lot of inequities and a lot of problematic ways in which the electoral system is structured that have nothing to do with minority rights or the Voting Rights Act.

"I'm always surprised that these people don't seem to be able to see those or go searching for those. I think you could go into any state and find congressional districts that have been defined for certainly very political reasons and which may violate as many or more aspects of the Constitution than ones that were more developed with some of the goals of the Voting Rights Act in mind.... I don't think that we are in a position to say that everything is fine, and we live in a color blind society, and we don't need to worry about these things."

Those in Korstad's camp note that blacks have finally begun to gain representation in Congress--many say due to redistricting. They argue that removing minority districts means removing blacks from office.

"I think they're clearly wrong," contends Duke Law's Everett in a thick Southern accent, noting that it isn't necessarily the job of the two black U.S. congressmen from North Carolina to represent every African American in the state. Similarly, the 10 white representatives are not elected to concern themselves solely with the state's white population.

Everett adds, "There doesn't have to be a majority of African Americans in a district to elect an African American. In the last election, a couple of African Americans were elected to the state senate from predominantly white districts. I think in North Carolina there is a willingness to cross race lines."

He may be right, according to Bernard Grofman, an author and editor of several books on the subject. "If these redrawn districts contain substantial, but not majority blacks, then the incumbent members may be able to hold onto their seats, at least initially," says the professor of political science at the University of California at Irvine.

Or, black representation could be eliminated, but at least not at the expense of the Democratic Party. If black voters are considered loyal Democrats, then scattering blacks in a handful of districts, thus helping elect a Democrat--but not a black Democrat--could be considered a laudable end. "[Democrats] really like to split the blacks up... to use them to buttress the Democratic seats to stem the Republican tide," Grofman says.

The major conflict, in groups from the NAACP to the Republican Party, nevertheless remains between "those who take the position on constitutional, legal, and moral grounds, that color blind districts is the only way to go, and those who take the more pragmatic position that we need to recognize the long history of minority exclusion--there was no black member of Congress for 100 years," as Grofman puts it.

"To eliminate some of the more peculiar shaped districts may not be so awful," he continues. "The problem is, once you start, it's not clear where things are going to stop. It could become an excuse to deliberately draw lines to make it impossible for blacks to be elected. I don't think that's going to happen, but it could happen."

Which perhaps is reminiscent of the situation 30 years ago, when the Voting Rights Act was first passed. But at the same time, Grofman points out a seeming contradiction: North Carolina has always been thought of as a progressive state--it's wealthier, more urban, more liberal than Mississippi and Alabama, and it has a concentration of major universities. "North Carolina has a relatively progressive history: It resisted desegregation less than Mississippi and Alabama," Grofman says.

The apparent contradiction shows up in the state's inconsistent support and denial of voting rights. North Carolina enacted black enfranchisement early on, yet, as Klopfer points out, some parts of the state ignored the Supreme Court's rulings entirely.

"Here in Durham, I remember very specifically very substantial African-American political activity," counters Everett, who was born and raised in Durham. "In 1951, my mother was one of the first women who ran for City Council. She would never have been elected without black support. In Durham, [blacks] were a very significant constructive political force."

But Durham wasn't always a happy land of "Leave it to the Beaver" meets "The Jeffersons." During the Depression, with the close Senate race of 1928 and the absence of a strictly enforced poll tax, the Democratic party simply bought black votes in Durham, for example.

Nevertheless, says Everett, "The voter registration was very substantial. My father was chairman of the election board and took every step to assure that there would be no problem with registration of blacks. So, here in Durham--I can't speak about other areas--there was active black participation going on back to 1950 and before. Fourteen years before the Voting Rights Act, in Durham, there had been very substantial advances." As for Klopfer's observations of intimidation, Everett says he is unaware of such incidents.

With regard to the historical activity of Durham's black community, Everett's evaluations appear statistically accurate: In 1960, 68 percent of all blacks in the city and county were registered compared to the statewide figure of 38 percent, according to Chris Howard's 1983 Duke honors thesis on the subject.

But, just because blacks were registered doesn't mean they actually had freedom in their voting. Klopfer says that black voters were intimidated by having to vote in public places with whites staring at them. It took a change of location for voting booths--from the county stores to schools and churches where people could vote in private--to make the improvement, he says.

"Even then, a lot of blacks, the older folks in our county didn't want to vote--they didn't want to risk trouble," Klopfer says. "Out in the county things were different from the city. You couldn't vote anonymously. If you were black, you weren't going to take the chance. In our neck of the wood, I don't think anything did happen, but they worried. The atmosphere was intimidating--it was intimidating to me."

If intimidation and continued muzzling of the black voice was the goal of some state officials of the pre-civil rights era, however, then these lawmakers had a problem that other states did not have. Other states could ensure white supremacy with a literacy test--North Carolina could not, because one-fifth of the white population was illiterate, while one-half of the adult black population was literate. If literacy tests were universally administered, they would have disenfranchised more than 50,000 whites and left almost 60,000 blacks voting. To ensure that such a turnaround would not occur, a "grandfather" clause excused voters from the literacy tests if they had been entitled to vote in any state in 1867, or were a descendent of a person who had been eligible to vote.

The net result in North Carolina was a black voter turnout of less than 50 percent for the 1964 Presidential election, one of many factors across the nation that prompted the Voting Rights Act's suspension of all literacy tests the following year. The legislation's intent: to increase minority representation.

But with 1994-95 events throwing the legislation's purpose into question, this minority representation has a somewhat uncertain future.

Even Klopfer, a long-time activist, has mixed feelings on congressional minority districts. "The intent, I think is admirable, the method is questionable. It's a double-edged sword," he says. "You can district to favor one race, or you can district to achieve the opposite result. When it comes to voting, it's best to ignore race. It seems to me that in North Carolina, the goal was to give a greater voice to blacks--and that's a goal I can applaud. But I think that in the long term we're much better off not to have race criteria for where voting districts should lie."

It's an issue that runs deep for many southerners and race-conscious Americans, and it's an issue that may not be fully resolved in any foreseeable future.