The Voting Rights Act Turns 60 — but Its Promise Is Still Under Threat

Sixty years ago, a landmark piece of voting rights legislation was signed into law — a policy that has aimed to course-correct America’s wobbled experiment of representative democracy.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson on August 6 of that year, effectively prohibited racial discrimination in voting and required federal oversight to ensure its implementation.

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Before then, Americans were routinely denied access to the ballot box based on the color of their skin, despite such practices being prohibited for nearly a century. But people in power still threatened Black and Brown residents — including women of color who had been excluded from the promise of The 19th Amendment in 1920 — with poll taxes, literacy tests and violence.

It would take decades of protest, organized in part by Black women and culminating in brutal public violence, to get Congress to take action.

But the promise of the now seminal Voting Rights Act is at risk as Americans mark this milestone anniversary.

The Supreme Court has struck down key aspects of the law and is poised to further challenge its provisions around race. It has also made it harder to challenge racialized voting maps.

President Donald Trump, who spread disinformation about his 2020 election loss to incite violence at the Capitol, is now attempting to overhaul how elections are run in the United States in part by demanding proof of citizenship — a policy that could disproportionately impact women and transgender people.

This comes as the attorney general guts the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division that helped enforce the federal laws that protect the right to vote and seeks sensitive state voter records.

The 19th continues to report on the fight for voting rights through the lens of everyday people — the women-led election workforce, the freedom fighters still around today, the queer and trans activists, and the local organizers. They’re all still seeking equal access to the ballot box on behalf of their communities — and that work isn’t going away soon.

‘All liberations are connected’: Marisa Richmond on fighting for voting rights on multiple fronts

Marisa Richmond’s formative memories are of an America under Jim Crow. She thinks back to a Hardee’s fast food restaurant in Nashville, Tennessee, a dollar clutched in her 6-year-old fingers, where no one would serve her. She remembers giving in and going outside to her mother, who sighed deeply with frustration.

She recalls the road trip to Dallas to see her maternal grandparents when her mother, who was light-skinned, rented a hotel room for the family, and she and the others had to sneak in under cover of darkness. Richmond was not allowed to leave even to get a Coca-Cola that night.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 substantially gutted discriminatory Jim Crow laws. But the Voting Rights Act of 1965 dealt the final blow to them.

Richmond, 66, who hails from Nashville, would go with her parents to vote. She grew up to teach history and women’s and gender studies at Middle Tennessee State University. And she made it her life’s work to empower people like herself — Black and transgender — to exercise their rights at the ballot box.

In 2008, Richmond became the first African-American transgender person to serve as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. She served for years as the president and lobbyist for the Tennessee Transgender Political Coalition and was the first trans person to win an election in Tennessee when she won a spot on the Davidson County Democratic Party Executive Committee.

For her, the fight for voting rights for Black Americans and trans Americans is one in the same.

“I think all liberations are connected,” she said. “First, there are some of us who have multiple identities, but the fight for equality is not isolated to one group in particular. You know, we’re all in it together.”

Today, she is retired and busier than ever. She fought voter ID requirements in her home state last year. And she continues to fight disenfranchisement nationally today.

‘The right to vote is foundational to our democracy’: Danielle Lang on the overlooked impact of the SAVE Act on trans voting rights

Danielle Lang is answering what feels like an obvious question posed on this 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act: Why is it important that all people have the right to vote?

Lang is the senior director of voting rights at Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that fights for access to the polls.

“The right to vote is foundational to our democracy,” she said. “And our democracy is foundational to our freedoms more generally, to order our lives as a community, to try to find shared values and govern ourselves according to those shared values, rather than live under the tyranny of elites and under authoritarian regime.

The question of who will be able to vote in coming elections, however, is not obvious. In April, the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 22, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, also known as the SAVE Act. It’s now before the Senate. The bill has been highly controversial because it forces voters to prove citizenship through documentation like a birth certificate.

Opponents of the measure point out that millions of married women don’t have birth certificates that reflect their legal last names.

Less attention has been paid to transgender Americans, an already disenfranchised minority who could see hundreds of thousands turned away from the ballot box if the SAVE Act becomes law.

According to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law, there were approximately 1.3 million transgender adults living in the United States as of 2022. Of those, around 30 percent will seek name changes, according to the nonprofit Center for Transgender Equality. Of those who do, 18 percent will succeed in updating their birth certificates to reflect their lived names.

The result is that 319,800 transgender people who are legally barred from making those updates are likely to be stricken from the voter rolls if the SAVE Act passes.

Transgender people already face steep barriers in making it to the polls. Nearly a quarter (24 percent) reported in 2022 that they were not interested in elections or involved in politics, and 19 percent said they felt their vote would not make a difference.

“Sixty years ago, the country recognized that it was not living up to its ideals and passed landmark legislation that was about stripping away barriers to voting,” Lang said. “And the SAVE legislation would do exactly the opposite.”

‘These spaces are meant for you’: Alejandra Gomez on the grassroots work of building our democracy

Alejandra Gomez’s introduction to organizing came in 2006, in the lead-up to Arizona’s referendum on Proposition 300, which banned colleges and universities from giving in-state tuition or state-funded financial aid to students who couldn’t prove U.S. citizenship or legal residency. The daughter of immigrant parents fought to oppose the measure.

In the midst of that campaign, a fellow organizer told her that she has a voice, and that it matters. “Since that moment, I have not been able to look back,” Gomez told The 19th.

Gomez, 43, is the executive director of Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA), a political advocacy group representing the interests of working-class Arizonans. The membership-led organization has worked to significantly expand Latinx political representation and access to the ballot. And its grassroots organizing is credited with helping Democrats clinch statewide victories in the state, particularly by helping turn out low-propensity voters and voters of color.

Gomez is reflecting on the 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act by leaning on the legislation’s vision to inspire the work that the current political moment demands. The law, Gomez said, was “forged through fire” with the goal of creating a democracy for all.

“Now more than ever, the democratic experiment of building the multiracial democracy that we know that we can be feels mission critical,” Gomez said.

Right now, the most important work Gomez and LUCHA are engaged in is called “deep organizing.” That is, Gomez said, “going into neighborhoods and building what we’re calling barrio teams — neighborhood teams — and inviting our community into a conversation about their vision for Arizona and the power that they want to wield inside of their democracy.”

It doesn’t take seasoned organizers to do this work, Gomez said.

“Pull together your neighbors and start with a conversation about how you feel as a community,” Gomez said. “Then together maybe go to a school board meeting or attend a zoning meeting, a city council meeting, and just begin to understand that these spaces are meant for you to be in.”

‘Recommitment and not nostalgia’: Celina Stewart on reclaiming the promise of the Voting Rights Act

The League of Women Voters believes that if 8.5 million people — just 3.5 percent of eligible voters — engage in nonviolent protest, they have the power to fight an anti-democratic administration.

That statistic is what’s driving the organization’s Unite and Rise 8.5: An Initiative to Defend Democracy — a movement of advocacy, civic education and community engagement. The initiative launched in May, as the league saw an increase in attacks on democracy after President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

While the program is new, the League of Women Voters’ fight for democracy is not, as a grassroots voter protection and expansion organization founded in 1920. From protesting discriminatory voting laws to challenging gerrymandering, protecting the essence of the 1965 act has always been a generational win for the league.

“Democracy is not self-executing; people have to defend it and be willing to act. This is about visibility, accountability and disruption to injustice that’s being attempted,” said Celina Stewart, the CEO of the League of Women Voters.

The initiative is rooted in a study by the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights that identified the 8.5 million-person figure. The league is calling for people to vote, call lawmakers and donate to democracy-defending organizations as ways to be civically engaged.

With current and pressing attacks on voting across the country and on the Voting Rights Act, Stewart feels that this anniversary demands courage: “We’re not commemorating a relic, we’re continuing a fight that continues to be relevant today.”

“This should be a time of recommitment and not nostalgia, because of what’s happening in this country. Congress has failed to restore the Voting Rights Act for over a decade and as people, I think we’re done waiting. The Unite and Rise 8.5 campaign is definitely a way for us to reclaim that promise,” Stewart said.

The Voting Rights Act Turns 60 — but Its Promise Is Still Under Threat was originally published by The 19th and is republished with permission.