U.S. Supreme Court Eliminates Voting Rights Enforcement; Renders "Mixed" Decision on Affirmative Action

Abayomi Azikiwe, editor of the Pan-African News Wire, at New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit on March 27, 2010. The event was a rally to demand justice in the assassination of Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah by the FBI on Oct. 28, 2009., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.

Supreme Court Eliminates Voting Rights Enforcement Provisions; Renders “Mixed” Decision on Affirmative Action

Civil rights gains under threat across the United States

By Abayomi Azikiwe
Editor, Pan-African News Wire

Two decisions by the United States Supreme Court in late June have provoked outrage among civil rights organizations and their allies. Affirmative action policies in education and employment as well as the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were two major advancements that grew out of the African American national movement.

These concessions granted by the racist ruling class were won through protracted struggle that extended from the 1950s and 1960s through the present period. The movement for universal suffrage began during the period after the Civil War when both African American and Women organizers formed alliances to win the right to vote.

With respect to affirmative action, activist groups in the community and on campuses demanded that civil rights laws be enforced utilizing quotas and timetables aimed at changing the composition of the labor force and the education sector. Since the 1960s, both affirmative action and voting rights have been under attack by the right-wing because the absence of these laws and mechanisms to ensure equality, civil rights will be meaningless.

Affirmative Action Ruling

Most opponents of affirmative action over the last several years advance different arguments than the racists used prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The notions of “race neutrality” or a “post-racial society” attempted to provide a rationale leading to a conclusion that programs which ostensibly guarantee basic democratic rights in U.S. society are no longer needed.

In Fisher v. University of Texas, a white high school graduate who had applied to the school and was not accepted filed the suit saying that their denial was due to affirmative action programs that sought to enhance diversity at the higher educational institution. The case attempted to overturn another ruling in the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger case involving the University of Michigan which said that race could be one factor in admission decisions by a university.

Although the Supreme Court in its 7-1 decision written by Justice Anthony Kennedy did not overturn affirmative action completely at the University of Texas, its ruling sent the case back to the Fifth Circuit Court for the development of new formulas of admission that placed a higher standard for the utilization of race. This ruling could open the door for further litigation that would place greater restrictions on the admission of African Americans and other oppressed groups to colleges and universities.

What is even more problematic about the Supreme Court ruling in Fisher v. University of Texas is that its legal implications are broader than just higher education. The decision could make it very difficult to bring legal actions related to employment discrimination because it set higher burdens of proof by the claimants.

Lyle Denniston wrote on the Supreme Court of the United State Blog (scotusblog.com) that “While the ruling was confined to the use of race in admissions to state- or local-government-operated colleges, it also has implications for the use of race in government job recruitment and public contract placement. And the ruling will put a searching new spotlight on a case that the Court has already granted for review at its next Term: the constitutionality of a plan approved by state voters to forbid any use of race in public college admissions and, by implication, in state hiring and contracting.”

The ruling is provocative because it provides legal motivations for opponents of affirmative action to challenge such programs at every college and university or other public institutions. The decision could open avenues for dozens of renewed efforts to completely outlaw efforts to enhance diversity and inclusion.

Denniston writes that “Whether a university program that takes any account of race can run this legal course and survive, whether at the University of Texas or elsewhere, will depend upon cases that are now likely to unfold across the country. There is a strong new incentive for opponents of “affirmative action” in college admissions to test virtually every such program; indeed, in some ways, the tone of the opinion would seem to invite such further testing.”

Voting Rights Act Enforcement Provisions Eliminated

Nonetheless, the Shelby County v. Holder case originating in Alabama gained much broader attention. The 5-4 ruling eliminated the two provisions that both determine whether voting rights have been violated, section 4, and the enforcement mechanism, section 5, which allows for federal intervention to block such attempts.

The ruling written by Justice John G. Roberts called for the U.S. Congress to develop new criteria for determining violations based upon political and social changes that have occurred since the original bill was passed in 1965. The plaintiffs who brought the case in Alabama argued that there has been enormous progress made over the last five decades and therefore close monitoring of possible violations were no longer needed.

The ruling also cites the 10th Amendment to the Constitution in an effort to say that the states which are subjected to close monitoring and approval when seeking to change laws affecting voting rights are treated differently than those which are not. Arguments related to states’ rights were utilized during the 1950s and 1960s by segregationists who maintained that the federal government had no authority to mandate that they abide by civil rights law.

How Voting Rights Were Won

In early 1965, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. went to Selma, Alabama to expose the blatant discrimination against African Americans seeking to register to vote. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had been working in Selma even two years prior to SCLC in voter registration campaigns.

During the course of the movement in Alabama in 1965 Jimmie Lee Jackson, a participant in a march in Marion, Alabama, was shot to death by a state trooper. Jackson was attempting to defend his mother from an assault by the law-enforcement officer.

Outrage spread surrounding the murder of Jackson and led to the first attempt to march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery. On March 7, 600 people set out on the road to Montgomery when they were stopped, gassed, beaten and driven back across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

This incident was publicized internationally and sparked broader support for the passage of the Voting Rights Act. After another failed attempt to march to Montgomery on March 9, both SCLC and SNCC kept up the pressure for weeks eventually leading to a federal ruling allowing the demonstration as well as the federalizing of the state national guard to provide security for the thousands that participated.

The-then President Lyndon B. Johnson was forced to introduce and rush through the Voting Rights Act which was signed in August of that year. The civil rights struggle and the passage of the bill has resulted in the election of thousands of African Americans and other people of color to various offices throughout the South and other regions of the U.S.

Arguments which claim that the enforcement provision of the Voting Rights Act is no longer needed are contradicted by developments in recent years. Numerous states have taken measures to restrict access to the ballot and to limit the effectiveness of elections through voter identification laws and redistricting.

These efforts aimed at limiting voter participation and effectiveness will go forward at a more rapid rate in the aftermath of the recent ruling. Despite the existence of an African American president, racism and national oppression are still very much in evidence in the U.S.

In the state of Michigan, an emergency manager law provides a pseudo-legal rationale for the removal of the authority of elected officials under the guise of a financial emergency. Even though African American elected officials in the state have requested intervention by the Justice Department based upon developments in African American majority municipalities, no action on the part of the Obama administration has been taken.

Just as civil rights laws and even federal court decisions were won through mass actions by African Americans and their allies, the overthrow of these attacks on voting rights and affirmative action can only be brought about through collective efforts by the people. These attacks on bourgeois democratic rights will become even more widespread as the economic crisis within the U.S. becomes more pronounced and the ruling class seeks a myriad of methods to divide and further exploit the workers and the oppressed.