Shelby County and the Vindication of Martin Luther King’s Dream
In a year when we mark the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, civil rights leaders and elected officials bemoan what they consider to be a huge setback in the fight for racial equality: the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Shelby County v. Holder. Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), who shed blood at Selma and helped organize the March on Washington, said at this summer’s commemoration that he was “not going to stand by and let the Supreme Court take the right to vote away from us.” Earlier, President Obama had intoned that the ruling “upsets decades of well-established practices that help make sure voting is fair.” Hillary Clinton opined that “citizens will be disenfranchised, victimized by the law, instead of served by it.”
You could be forgiven for thinking that Shelby County means that racial minorities are now disenfranchised. But all the Court did was ease out an emergency provision enacted in 1965 to provide temporary federal oversight of state elections based on that era’s racial disparities. While politicians and pundits irresponsibly liken the ruling to sanctioning Bull Connor’s dogs and the murder of Medgar Evers, it actually shows the strength of our protections for voting rights.
