vra
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It’s Time to Revive the Heart of the Voting Rights Act
Fifty-three years ago today, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered in Mississippi, where they had gathered to register black voters as part of Freedom Summer. Their murders, and the brutal treatment of voting rights marchers in Selma, Ala., less than a year later, galvanized support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965—one…
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3 Years Later, the Ghosts of Shelby Still Haunt Us
Three years ago, the Supreme Court handed down a crushing ruling in the landmark case Shelby v. Holder (pdf). For reasons still mostly unclear to me (Chief Justice John Roberts partially opined that key provisions of the Voting Rights Act were “extraordinary measures” no longer needed because America’s legacy on race “had changed”), Section 5 of the…