The New York Times Magazine
August 2, 2015
Photographs by Jeremy M. Lange for The New York Times. Illustration by Ben Wiseman.
By Jim Rutenberg
On
the morning of his wedding, in 1956, Henry Frye realized that he had a
few hours to spare before the afternoon ceremony. He was staying at his
parents’ house in Ellerbe, N.C.; the ceremony would take place 75 miles
away, in Greensboro, the hometown of his fiancée; and the drive wouldn’t
take long. Frye, who had always been practical, had a practical
thought: Now might be a good time to finally register to vote. He was 24
and had just returned from Korea, where he served as an Air Force
officer, but he was also a black man in the American South, so he wasn’t
entirely surprised when his efforts at the registrar’s office were
blocked.
Adopting
a tactic common in the Jim Crow South, the registrar subjected Frye to
what election officials called a literacy test. In 1900, North Carolina
voters amended the state’s Constitution to require that all new voters
“be able to read and write any section of the Constitution in the
English language,” but for decades some registrars had been applying
that already broad mandate even more aggressively, targeting perfectly
literate black registrants with arbitrary and obscure queries, like
which president served when or who had the ultimate power to adjourn
Congress. “I said, ‘Well, I don’t know why are you asking me all of
these questions,’ ” Frye, now 83, recalled. “We went around and around,
and he said, ‘Are you going to answer these questions?’ and I said, ‘No,
I’m not going to try.’ And he said, ‘Well, then, you’re not going to
register today.’ ”
Sitting
with me on the enclosed porch of his red-brick ranch house in
Greensboro, drinking his wife’s sweet tea, Frye could joke about the
exchange now, but at the time it left him upset and determined. When he
met Shirley at the altar, the first thing he said was: “You know they
wouldn’t let me register?”
“Can we talk about this later?” she replied.
After
a few weeks, Frye drove over to the Board of Elections in Rockingham,
the county seat, to complain. An official told him to go back and try
again. This time a different registrar, after asking if he was the
fellow who had gone over to the election board, handed him a paragraph
to copy from the Constitution. He copied it, and with that, he became a
voter.
But
in the American South in 1956, not every would-be black voter was an
Air Force officer with the wherewithal to call on the local election
board; for decades, most had found it effectively impossible to attain
the most elemental rights of citizenship. Only about one-quarter of
eligible black voters in the South were registered that year, according
to the limited records available. By 1959, when Frye went on to become
one of the first black graduates of the University of North Carolina law
school, that number had changed little. When Frye became a legal
adviser to the students running the antisegregation sit-ins at the
Greensboro Woolworth’s in 1960, the number remained roughly the same.
And when Frye became a deputy United States attorney in the Kennedy
administration, it had grown only slightly. By law, the franchise
extended to black voters; in practice, it often did not.
What
changed this state of affairs was the passage, 50 years ago this month,
of the Voting Rights Act. Signed on Aug. 6, 1965, it was meant to
correct “a clear and simple wrong,” as Lyndon Johnson said. “Millions of
Americans are denied the right to vote because of their color. This law
will ensure them the right to vote.” It eliminated literacy tests and
other Jim Crow tactics, and — in a key provision called Section 5 —
required North Carolina and six other states with histories of black
disenfranchisement to submit any future change in statewide voting law,
no matter how small, for approval by federal authorities in Washington.
No longer would the states be able to invent clever new ways to suppress
the vote. Johnson called the legislation “one of the most monumental
laws in the entire history of American freedom,” and not without
justification. By 1968, just three years after the Voting Rights Act
became law, black registration had increased substantially across the
South, to 62 percent. Frye himself became a beneficiary of the act that
same year when, after a close election, he became the first black state
representative to serve in the North Carolina General Assembly since
Reconstruction.
In
the decades that followed, Frye and hundreds of other new black
legislators built on the promise of the Voting Rights Act, not just
easing access to the ballot but finding ways to actively encourage
voting, with new state laws allowing people to register at the
Department of Motor Vehicles and public-assistance offices; to register
and vote on the same day; to have ballots count even when filed in the
wrong precinct; to vote by mail; and, perhaps most significant, to vote
weeks before Election Day. All of those advances were protected by the
Voting Rights Act, and they helped black registration increase steadily.
In 2008, for the first time, black turnout was nearly equal to white
turnout, and Barack Obama was elected the nation’s first black
president.
Since
then, however, the legal trend has abruptly reversed. In 2010,
Republicans flipped control of 11 state legislatures and, raising the
specter of voter fraud, began undoing much of the work of Frye and
subsequent generations of state legislators. They rolled back early
voting, eliminated same-day registration, disqualified ballots filed
outside home precincts and created new demands for photo ID at polling
places. In 2013, the Supreme Court, in the case of Shelby County v. Holder,
directly countermanded the Section 5 authority of the Justice
Department to dispute any of these changes in the states Section 5
covered. Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., writing for the majority,
declared that the Voting Rights Act had done its job, and it was time to
move on. Republican state legislators proceeded with a new round of
even more restrictive voting laws.
All
of these seemingly sudden changes were a result of a little-known part
of the American civil rights story. It involves a largely Republican
countermovement of ideologues and partisan operatives who, from the
moment the Voting Rights Act became law, methodically set out to
undercut or dismantle its most important requirements. The story of that
decades-long battle over the iconic law’s tenets and effects has rarely
been told, but in July many of its veteran warriors met in a North
Carolina courthouse to argue the legality of a new state voting law that
the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University Law School
has called one of the “most restrictive since the Jim Crow era.”
The decision, which is expected later this year, could determine
whether the civil rights movement’s signature achievement is still
justified 50 years after its signing, or if the movement itself is
finished.
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