On anniversary of Voting Rights Act, McClellan, advocates caution against rollbacks

Two years ago, the late Lois Dedeaux McClellan voted for her daughter Jennifer to become the first Black woman to represent Virginia in Congress, but there had been a period in her 91 years of life when the law prevented her from voting at all.

Though the suffrage movement granted white women the right to vote by 1920, women of color had to wait to cast their ballots until the federal Voting Rights Act was signed into law, 45 years later. Now on the 59th anniversary of that landmark legislation, Lois’ daughter U.S. Rep. Jennifer McClellan, D-Virginia, is still pressing Congress to ensure fair access to voting for all.

“The fight since day one is who gets to participate,” McClellan said in an interview this week. “We’ve made a lot of progress, but every time we make progress, we face a backlash. It’s up to all of us to really demand that Congress step up and protect and expand voting rights.”

That quest led McClellan to co-sponsor  the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act in 2023. The former would restore provisions that have since been removed from the Voting Rights Act of 1965, while the latter would expand voter registration and designate Election Day as a federal holiday. Both bills have been introduced but not progressed.

McClellan said she doesn’t think they will get far unless more Democrats are elected into Congress.

While the Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibited racial discrimination in voting, a 2013 U.S. Supreme Court ruling undid parts of the law, striking down in a 5-4 ruling provisions that gave the federal government oversight when states with histories of racial discrimination sought to change their voting laws.

In the decade since, a number of states have adjusted their voting laws in ways that some advocacy groups say disenfranchise Black voters or other minority groups.

Such has been the case in Georgia, where a 2021 law included restrictions on absentee ballot drop boxes and penalties for passing out refreshments to people standing in line waiting to vote. More recently, a redistricting case in Texas alleges that Black and Hispanic votes were diluted in violation of the Voting Rights Act. Despite a trial judge and appellate court panel both ruling the voter map was in violation of the federal law, the full federal Fifth Circuit Court disagreed.

It’s nothing new to Fergie Reid Jr., the son of Fergie Reid Sr. — who was the only Black member of Virginia’s House of Delegates when he was elected in 1968, just three years after the Voting Rights Act.

“This s— has always been happening; it never stopped,” Reid Jr. said of barriers to voting or laws that disenfranchise people of color. “Everything didn’t just change because the Voting Rights Act got passed. It was always a struggle, one step at a time, pushing a rock up a hill. And now the rock is falling back down the hill.”

In the century before the Voting Rights Act Black men had the right to vote and some had been elected. But after the “hot minute” of that, Reid Jr. said, their access to legislative power was “too much for [white] people.”  What followed was decades of Jim Crow laws that disenfranchised people of color. It took until the 1960s for his father to make history as the first Black member of state government since the Reconstruction era following the Civil War.

In the decade before his  election, Reid Sr. had also encouraged Black voter engagement through the Richmond Crusade For Voters, an organization he’d co-founded that still operates today. When Reid’s 90th birthday rolled around in 2015, his son launched the 90 For 90 campaign to bolster voter registration and candidate recruitment.

Black representation in Virginia has grown over the past decade. This year, Reid Jr. said he’s focusing recruitment efforts in states where candidates of color or Democrats could face an uphill battle.

“Whether or not [Kamala] Harris can win, you have to compete everywhere,” he said.

Broad engagement is something Black Futures Lab political director Alexsis Rodgers said that the organization is working on, as well, inside and outside Virginia.

“We know that there are Black community members there who want to be engaged, but they might not be getting good information. They might not know what the latest laws are in their communities,” Rodgers said. “And so in Georgia, North Carolina and Wisconsin, we’re really focused on doing that outreach.”

While not totally partisan, the push for enhanced voting access often falls along partisan lines.

McClellan noted that when she was still a state senator and Democrats held majorities in Virginia’s legislature and governorship, they were “bucking the national trend” in Southern states to broaden voting access rather than restrict it.

The legislature passed laws to allow for more absentee voting, the creation of ballot drop boxes, and extended early voting. McClellan, along with Del. Cia Price, D-Newport News, also passed the Voting Rights Act of Virginia in 2021.

Meanwhile, as 2024’s elections play out at the local, state and national level, so do proposed changes in who can participate and how. Georgia’s election board has proposed changes with a focus on Fulton County — where a large portion of the state’s Black population votes — which would require “reasonable inquiry” before approving election results. With Fulton County in particular still at the center of former president and current candidate Donald Trump’s claims he actually won the 2020 election, voting rights advocates warn the measures could be misused by board members to reject the results of the presidential race.

Trump praised Georgia’s electoral board’s proposals in a recent rally.

And though changes to election processes are the purview of state election boards, McClellan said the congressional efforts to restore parts of the Voting Rights Act that have been cast aside could prevent states from making changes that hearken to the days when her ancestors couldn’t vote or were subjected to restrictions like poll taxes and literacy tests.

Rodgers, who has also been a Democratic organizer and supporter of McClellan, stressed that the federal bills are “about protecting democracy.”

“Sometimes that means Republicans will win, sometimes that means Democrats will win,” she said. “But ultimately it means that more people can participate in our democracy.”

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This article first appeared on Virginia Mercury and is republished here with permission. Virginia Mercury is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Virginia Mercury maintains editorial independence.