"It took the blood, the courage and the martyrdom of civil rights workers combined with the political spine of a president and congressional leaders to break this stranglehold on the right to vote. The legislature passed and President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act (VRA), which would save America from its worst self. And, this time, in the late 1960s, the US supreme court came down on the side of democracy and the 15th amendment. Two crucial decisions buttressed the VRA, noting that it was not only constitutional but also created to deal with “the subtle, as well as the obvious, state regulations which have the effect of denying citizens their right to vote because of race”.
"The Roberts court, however, bears no resemblance to the one in the 1960s and has all the anti-voting rights earmarks of the court after the civil war. The Roberts court’s assault on the VRA and the 15th amendment has been relentless and brutal to American democracy." -- Carol Anderson, professor of African American Studies at Emory University, writing in The Guardian about the Roberts Court's turning the clock back to the Jim Crow era of Black disenfranchisement.
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