On the 52nd anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, 31 states with histories of racial discrimination no longer have federal oversight of their voting process.
Tuesday voters flooded to the polls and caucuses in Arizona, Idaho and Utah. Hillary Clinton won Arizona, but Sanders gained in the delegate count by swamping her in the Idaho and Utah caucuses, generating turnouts that overwhelmed caucus sites. Arizona lines were so long because election officials in Phoenix's Maricopa County, the largest in the state, reduced the number of polling places by 70 percent from 2012 to 2016, to just one polling place per every 21,000 voters
The Voting Rights Act (VRA), passed by Congress in July, 1965 and signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson fifty years ago this month, has had a storied history. This basic achievement of the Civil Rights Movement has also seen conservatives, including long-time anti VRA campaigner and now U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts, fight it tooth and nail. Ari Berman tells this story, in a book Michael O'Donnell calls both a "depressing" and a "galvanizing" read.
Reader Comments: Response to Occupy; Greece and Debt Forgiveness; Why Bernie Sanders; Confederate Flags, Symbols, and Racism; U.S. Torture Program; Death Penalty; and more...
Announcements: Benefit Concert for Civil Rights; Rally for Eric Garner; NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and The Voting Rights Act at 50; Rosenberg Case Bombshell - Key Witness Lied; Robert Meeropol statement
Johnson gave full credit to the movement. “The real hero of this struggle is the American Negro. His actions and protests, his courage to risk safety and even to risk his life, have awakened the conscience of this nation. His demonstrations have been designed to call attention to injustice, designed to provoke change, designed to stir reform. He has called upon us to make good the promise of America.”
Fifty years ago (March 15, 1965), in the wake of Selma's Bloody Sunday, President Lyndon Johnson addressed Congress on the subject of 'The American Promise,' calling for the immediate passage of a voting right act that would end disfranchisement of African Americans.
"I think the phony claims and renewed political chicanery are a reflection of the fact that a century-and-a-half after the Civil War, and 50 years after the signing of the Voting Rights Act, a deeper struggle for democracy, equality and inclusion continues." -- Lorraine C. Minnite
Reader Comments- Undocumented Student Leaders and Mississippi Freedom Summer; Scott Walker's Scandals; Protect Voting Rights; U S Created Child Migrant Crisis; Egypt Jails Al Jazeera Staff; Precariat and Global Erosion of Job Security; Freedom Summer Legacies; Gabriel Kolko; Doonesbury on Climate Change; Correction to earlier posting
Cecily McMillan to be Released next week; Memorial Concert for Pete and Toshi Seeger-July 20; MEDICC's Educational Exchange to Havana
Reader Comments - ACTION NEEDED - Stop Iraq Executions; Voting Rights Act; Martin Luther King and Nonviolence; Our Postal Commons; De Blasio's Election; Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA; Tuition-Free Public College Education; New Orleans Teachers and Katrina;
Announcements: Muste Institute 40th Anniversary concert; South Africa Today - Online Meeting; Book Talk-Red Apple: Communism and McCarthyism in Cold War New York; Vandenberg's Role in US Global Domination
Arizona and Kansas have sued the Election Assistance Commission and are setting up a two-tiered system of voter registration, which could disenfranchise thousands of voters and infringe on state and federal law.
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