A Commitment to Voter Rights

Signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in the Capitol Rotunda, Washington, D.C. President Lyndon B. Johnson moves to shake hands with and give a pen he used to sign the bill into law to Martin Luther King Jr.

When the National Commission on the Voting Rights Act held a hearing in Montgomery, Alabama, last spring, seated among the seven commission members was Rice’s Chandler Davidson, the Radoslav A. Tsanoff Professor Emeritus of Public Affairs and Sociology. But he wasn’t there just to listen to the testimonies of lawyers and academicians specializing in voting rights, elected officials, and everyday citizens who wanted to share their experiences with discrimination against minority voters in the South. Davidson will draft a report summarizing information that the commission obtains through a series of four to six regional hearings around the nation.

The hearings are being held to gather testimony and other evidence that will be used to create a comprehensive record of racial discrimination in voting since 1982—the last time the temporary features of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) were reauthorized. Congress enacted the VRA of 1965 to protect the right to vote among minorities, and it relies on an extensive record of discrimination in voting to justify the need to extend provisions of the act that will expire in 2007. Those provisions include a requirement that jurisdictions in all or part of 16 states submit voting changes to the Justice Department or a federal court for approval before they can be implemented; a requirement that more than 450 counties and townships provide language assistance to voters with limited English proficiency and authorization of the Department of Justice to appoint an examiner or send observers to any jurisdiction in the 16 states singled out by the VRA to protect people of color.

Davidson has more than a passing familiarity with the ins and outs of the VRA. He testified before Congress for the 1982 reauthorization of the act, and he co-edited a seminal book on voting rights, Quiet Revolution in the South: The Impact of the Voting Rights Act, 1965–1990.

His career-long interest in racial politics and minority voting spans more than four decades. “I got caught up in the civil rights movement as a student at the University of Texas [at Austin] in the early ’60s,” Davidson says. He vividly remembers participating in “stand ins” before the Civil Rights Act was passed. At that time, movie theaters in Austin would not sell tickets to blacks, so Davidson and others would form a line outside the box office and take turns buying tickets and then trying to purchase another ticket for a black friend. When the theater refused to sell the additional ticket, the protestors would request a refund for the ticket they had already bought. These repeated transactions slowed business for the theaters because other customers had to wait longer in line. Eventually the group picketed other businesses in the university neighborhood, which caused some of them to desegregate.

When Davidson joined the Rice faculty in 1966, he was working on a PhD from Princeton and chose to study black politics and the rise of the civil rights movement in Houston for his doctoral thesis, which was published as a book. Back then, Houston’s city council consisted of eight members elected citywide. Davidson realized how difficult it was for blacks to get elected under this system, given the racial bloc voting by whites, and he testified as an expert witness in the case that resulted in the current council structure, which consists of nine single-member districts and five at-large members.

He has since testified in more than 30 voting-rights cases around the nation, and he says the National Commission on the Voting Rights Act, which was created by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, remains necessary. “There’s still a lot of racism in this country,” he says. “There are people who don’t want their representative to be black.”

Despite all the incidents of discrimination that he has read about over the years, Davidson was surprised by some of the evidence of discrimination presented during the hearing in Montgomery. A New Orleans political scientist, for example, presented data showing that a high degree of racially politicized voting still exists throughout the South. And in a referendum in Alabama last year, white voters overwhelmingly opposed removing from the state constitution some language requiring segregation—even though this language was rendered null and void by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

“Racism just dies hard,” Davidson says. But he notes that much progress has been made and pointed out that the number of black officials elected in Alabama now is proportional to the state’s population, thanks largely to the VRA. “No other state,” he says, “can claim that.”

—B. J. Almond