The Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been one of the most prominent pieces of civil rights legislation. Today, the Supreme Court will revisit this landmark law’s constitutionality.
Our oral history project collected stories from people who witnessed the passage of the act and who share their memories of its impact on the civil rights movement. Take a listen to their stories here.
For 48 years, the Voting Rights Act has been one of the most prominent pieces of Civil Rights legislation. This week, the Supreme Court will examine a constitutional challenge to the act. The case asks whether the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is still necessary and whether voters still risk disenfranchisement in certain parts of the country.
We’re asking people to share their memories from when the act was first passed. Listen to one above from Robert Summers and go here to learn more.
Archival find from @noreensnasir, who was searching for footage of unrest following the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984. Here’s a note sent to the NewsHour (then known as the MacNeil-Lehrer Report) by the Deputy Consul General of India.
Animation by ciceroinfo. H/T Andy Revkin/NYT
Judy Woodruff with then presidential candidate Jimmy Carter on Feb. 24, 1976. Her thoughts about Election Day:
I try not to get too carried away on Election Day every four years, because, after all, I have a job to do. But the truth is I’m walking an emotional tightrope all day long. I love covering American politics, I’m fascinated by watching most politicians, and I could talk to voters for hours about what matters to them and how they see the men and women competing for their support. And the presidential campaigns have put so much time, energy and heart into defeating the other one, you can’t ignore the element of drama — it’s a little like watching two locomotives barreling down parallel train tracks, one of them headed to a happy destination, the other off a cliff. No one knows which will end up where; the suspense is overwhelming.
Of course there are huge stakes involved — war and peace, government moves that affect the well-being of millions — but on Election Day what comes into sharpest relief for me are the men and women celebrating or mourning the outcome. I saw this first as a young reporter covering the 1976 campaign when President Gerald Ford was defeated by former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter. Assigned on election night to cover the Carter staff at an Atlanta hotel, I’ll never forget the look of shock and sheer joy on a young aide’s face when she realized the candidate she’d devoted the last few years of her life to, had won. Then, at the White House four years later, as by-then President Carter was focused on trying to win the release of U.S. hostages held in the embassy in Iran, I saw the same aide dissolve in tears as she watched him concede to Ronald Reagan.
There would be a similar cycle in 1988 and 1992, as the team surrounding President George H. W. Bush thrilled to his victory over Michael Dukakis, then collapsed in disappointment when Bill Clinton, with a boost from Ross Perot, wiped out Bush’s dreams of a second term.
If there is no greater high than the celebration around a presidential victor, and no more painful low than the disappointment felt by the loser, the 2000 recount was an incredible news story and an emotional roller-coaster. Thirty-eight days of chad-counting and court challenges dimmed some of the glow from George W. Bush’s celebration after the Supreme Court ruled in his favor. But the sting felt by the team around Al Gore was probably no less acute than it would have been with a clean result on election night.
I think what Gore said in his concession speech that December gets at the core of what makes our system of government the best of all the alternatives:
“Almost a century and a half ago, Senator Stephen Douglas told Abraham Lincoln, who had just defeated him for the presidency: ‘Partisan feeling must yield to patriotism. I’m with you, Mr. President, and God bless you.’
Well, in that same spirit, I say to President-elect Bush that what remains of partisan rancor must now be put aside, and may God bless his stewardship of this country.”
That couldn’t have been easy for Gore, but it helped begin the healing process that was so necessary after the draining, bitter post-election period. It set an example for the army of aides and advisers who had worked so hard for Gore’s election, and undoubtedly for his supporters as well. Looking back, it’s an approach that seems especially appealing today, at a time when our political divisions seem more pronounced than ever.
My job on Election Day is in many ways like every other working day — to gather the facts and ask the questions that help viewers and readers understand what is happening. But if the surface looks calm, it’s deceptive. By the end of the evening, underneath, a part of me is an emotional mess: thinking about the happy winners and the heartbroken losers, and marveling that, yet again, the country I love has voted in a new leader — or rejected a challenger — without firing a shot, or shedding a drop of blood. If you look closely, you may see me hiding a lump in my throat, because I feel so lucky to live in the United States of America.
Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky reads Elizabeth Bishopa’s Columbus Day poem on discovery
“I’m not sure anybody’s imagination has gotten that balance quite right, but Elizabeth Bishop, looking at the mystery of the Brazilian landscape, catches the splendor of that landscape and the mystery that drew the first invaders in toward a sexual or imperial conquest that the invaders never quite attained.
First, Bishop describes the fabric of the Brazilian forest, a dense tapestry.
Every square inch filling in with foliage-
big leaves, little leaves, and giant leaves,
blue, blue green and olive,
with occasional lighter veins and edges,
or a satin under leaf turned over;
Monster ferns
in silver-gray relief,
and flowers too, like giant water lilies
up in the air— up rather in the leaves— purple, yellow, two yellows, pink,
rust red, and greenish white;
solid but airy, fresh as if just finished
and taken off the frame.
That’s the fresh woven fabric that the European cannot quite attain, though they invaded. The ending of Bishop’s poem evokes the paradox of Portuguese soldiers glinting like little nail heads lost and transformed, even as they seem to conquer. The hemisphere, Bishop seems to say, eludes our attempts to know it.
in creaking armor, they came and found it all,
not unfamiliar: n
o lover’s walks, no bowers,
no cherries to be picked, no late music,
but corresponding, nevertheless,
to an old dream of wealth and luxury
already out of style when they left home-
wealth, plus a brand new pleasure.
Directly after Mass, humming perhaps
’L’Homme arme or some such tune,
they ripped away into the hanging fabric,
each out to catch an Indian for himself-
those maddening little women who kept calling,
calling to each other, (or had the birds waked up?)
And retreated, always retreating behind it.”
In the 67-year history of the United Nations, Russia has cast more veto votes than any other Security Council member. Its 128 vetoes account for nearly half of all vetoes in the council’s history, more than the number cast by the United States and Great Britain combined. It has also used the veto to effectively put the brakes on any serious action against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
While the veto gives Security Council members outsized power, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said that Russia’s love affair with the no vote actually weakens the country’s standing and takes entire council’s influence down a peg as well.
“Russian power, in many respects, is reflected through their capability of having the veto in the Security Council,” Albright told us. “But ironically, what it does is make the Security Council less relevant. … By just doing a block, they take themselves out of having a leadership role in multilateral diplomacy.”
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In retrospect, it seems perfectly obvious that everyone should have known what was coming, that this was, after all, the rise of the biggest evil mankind had ever seen.
But when you put yourself in the shoes of these diplomats, journalists, writers, casual visitors, as I did, it paints a very different picture. History is always perfect in hindsight. It’s not perfect at the time. So I wanted to know, what did they know, when did they know it, and what did they get wrong, and why did they get it wrong?
— Andrew Nagorski, Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power
“We were trained as writers with the idea that literature is something that can change reality. That it’s not just a very sophisticated entertainment, but a way to act.
Today these ideas have disappeared practically among the new generation. Now the young writers consider that it’s too pretentious to think that literature can produce this kind of thing.
But when I was young, when I started to write, we were totally convinced that literature was a kind of weapon,” Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa
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What do you think the role of literature is today? How has it changed?
