Blackballed by Darryl Pinckney

Author:Darryl Pinckney [Pinckney, Darryl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59017-813-3
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2014-09-29T16:00:00+00:00

3.

Obama’s election should not be regarded as a culmination, Debo P. Adegbile warns in an essay included in The Most Fundamental Right: Contrasting Perspectives on the Voting Rights Act (2012), edited by Daniel McCool. Obama’s victory should be seen as a new chapter in an evolving story.9

Adegbile, the associate director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, successfully argued before the Supreme Court in 2009 in Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One v. Holder against a challenge to the federal preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act. At that time, Section 5 called for federal court approval of changes in voting in sixteen states covered under the statute.

The enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act, temporary measures that had to be renewed or reauthorized by Congress periodically, were extended four times, most recently in 2006. The extension received bipartisan support in the end. While conservatives were willing to flatter the Voting Rights Act as historically important legislation, they did so in order to get rid of preclearance—that need to seek federal approval for changes in voting practices. They argued that the measure was insulting to the states under its jurisdiction because these states had changed and therefore the measure was out of date.

But Adegbile countered that jurisdictions such as Louisiana or Texas were under federal obligation precisely because in those states voting rights violations persisted. Adegbile also pointed out that because minority voting rights had been protected in Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, these states, though covered, nevertheless elected blacks to Congress in the 1990s for the first time since Reconstruction. In 2011, discriminatory redistricting plans in Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama were halted, if only temporarily, because of Section 5. The evidence before the courts and Congress illustrated how necessary federal supervision was still. “The constitutional attacks have not succeeded since 1965,” Adegbile warned, “but neither have they ceased.”

I remember thinking how interested in Adegbile’s essay my father would have been. I missed, at last, his tedious insistence on race, my historian of charismatic movements, my collective behavior analyst, my own personal resource mobilization theorist. During the 2012 election, I missed his voice, his incorrigibility, his bibliographical reach. Most of the books from which I got my overview of the history of the black vote came from the swayed shelves in his den. I looked back and was moved by how much he knew about the subject, how much of his mental being he’d given to the freedom struggle.

And then in June 2013 it happened: the Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act.

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