Stacey Abrams and the Voting Rights Fight That Followed Bloody Sunday

The Voting Rights Act of nineteen sixty-five was the legislative achievement that Bloody Sunday made possible. It required states with documented histories of voter suppression to obtain federal preclearance before changing their election laws. For nearly fifty years, that requirement stood as the enforcement mechanism for the act's guarantees.

In two thousand thirteen, the United States Supreme Court, in Shelby County versus Holder, struck down the preclearance formula. The Court ruled that conditions had changed enough that the coverage formula was no longer constitutional. The dissent, written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, compared the decision to throwing away an umbrella in a rainstorm because you're not getting wet.

In the two thousand eighteen Georgia gubernatorial race, Georgia's Secretary of State Brian Kemp oversaw a voter roll purge that one investigation found had wrongly removed approximately three hundred forty thousand registrations, and the closure of more than two hundred polling places, primarily in counties with predominantly Black populations, while simultaneously running as the Republican candidate for governor against Stacey Abrams. Kemp won by fifty-four thousand seven hundred twenty-three votes. Abrams did not offer a conventional concession. She acknowledged the mathematical result and named what she believed had produced it.

She founded Fair Fight Action and spent the next two years building voter registration and education infrastructure across Georgia. In the twenty twenty presidential election and the twenty twenty-one Senate runoffs, Georgia's Democratic results were attributed in significant part to that infrastructure. The state that Lyndon Johnson had written off as unreachable when he submitted the Voting Rights Act was not unreachable. It had simply been suppressed.

The fight that began on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in nineteen sixty-five did not end with the Voting Rights Act. It did not end with Shelby County. It is being conducted in Georgia today by the same methods, against the same resistance, for the same rights.