UF professors recall 40th anniversary of Voting Rights Act

July 28, 2005

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — As the Voting Rights Act nears its 40th anniversary, University of Florida professors are available to comment on the act’s significance and impact on American history.

Signed into law on Aug. 6, 1965, by President Lyndon B. Johnson, the act empowered the federal government to oversee voter registration in counties using discriminatory tests and in counties that had low minority turnout rates in the 1964 presidential election.

That translated into the government supervising voting polls in nine states, as well as parts of other states including five counties in Florida, said David Chalmers, a retired UF distinguished service professor of history and author of “Backfire: How the Ku Klux Klan Helped the Civil Rights Movement.” He added that polls are being supervised to this day.

Chalmers said UF had the most active civil rights movement among the predominantly white universities in the Deep South. Made up of students and faculty, it also included the largest women’s movement in Florida, composed mainly of faculty wives and black school teachers.

Brian Ward, a UF history professor who specializes in civil rights, said Johnson didn’t just wake up one morning and decide there should be an act to protect minority voting rights. Instead, he said, the act came about as a result of the Civil Rights campaign that had been going on for decades.

“People shouldn’t think of it as something that is designed exclusively to benefit African Americans or any other minority group. It’s a piece of legislation designed to protect some of the most cherished ideals in American democracy – the right of people to exercise the right to vote,” he said.

Ward noted that before the law was passed in 1965, there were many counties in the Deep South where no black people voted, were denied registration and were threatened by economic intimidation and violence.

The law produced a political revolution. Within four years, black registration in Mississippi jumped from 7 percent to 60 percent, with similar results elsewhere.

In order to prevent new forms of voter restrictions, the law was renewed in 1970, 1975, 1982 and 1992, and will be up for renewal again in 2007.

On the 40th anniversary of the law, which opened up the political system to black voters in the South, some feel the Georgia legislature has had another go at restricting minority voting. Although the Georgia Secretary of State said there is no identity problem, the new Georgia law, which is much stricter than Florida’s laws, requires an official governmental picture ID. Civil rights advocates argue that the true intent of the law is to create problems for poor, uneducated and uninformed blacks, Latinos and Asians, diminishing their likelihood of voting.

Under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, state action which diminishes the voting of protected categories must be approved by the U.S. Justice Department or the D.C. Federal Appeals Court (on which Supreme Court nominee John Roberts sits).

Most recent cases have dealt with restricting black, Latino and Asian American voters, and, in the case of South Dakota, American Indians.

The new Georgia law is a reminder of why the Voting Rights Act was passed in the first place, Chalmers said.