Vol. 77/No. 27      July 15, 2013

The Voting Rights Act, passed as the massive proletarian Black rights movement fought to destroy Jim Crow segregation, was a historic gain for the working class. It barred racist discrimination in voting, which had been enforced with brutal violence in the Jim Crow South.

Affirmative action programs guaranteeing that Blacks and women could gain access to jobs, promotion and educational opportunities long denied them were another important victory for working-class unity.

These programs were conceded by the propertied rulers in the late 1960s and early ’70s on the heels of the overthrow of Jim Crow and in reaction to rebellions in the Black communities of hundreds of cities across the country.

Like all gains wrested by the working class in struggle, over time and in the absence of continuing mobilizations, the rulers have in practice chipped away at and twisted these advances.

On June 24 the Supreme Court handed down a 7-1 decision declining to rule on the constitutionality of the University of Texas at Austin’s diversity program. The challenge was filed by Abigail Fisher, a Caucasian woman who claimed she was rejected by the school in order to make room for Black students. It was sent back to lower courts for reconsideration.

The university was backed by briefs filed by 57 Fortune 500 companies, dozens of other colleges, the NAACP, a number of unions and more than three dozen prominent military officers.

“The national security interest in officer corps diversity must not be threatened by a broad ruling against race-conscious admission,” retired Adm. Bobby Inman, former director of the National Security Agency and deputy director of the CIA, wrote in a Time magazine article last October.

While the decision means diversity programs can continue to exist, it stresses courts must give them close appraisal and many opponents of Black rights say they will step up court challenges.

Programs like the one at the University of Texas reflect the dilution and distortion of affirmative action over time from its original purpose to combat systematic discrimination against African-Americans, other oppressed national minorities and women, which strengthened the unity of the working class. At first affirmative action with enforceable quotas helped batter down a century of racial and sexual discrimination that blocked millions from whole industries, jobs and colleges.

But as the battles that won these gains receded, the capitalist rulers began backtracking on quotas. They were declared unconstitutional in 1978, in a Supreme Court upholding a challenge by Allan Bakke, a Caucasian college student, to affirmative action quotas at the University of California at Davis medical school.

Today, affirmative action has more and more been channeled into “diversity” programs aimed at advancing a “chosen few” into bourgeois-minded professional layers, including the military officer corps, as part of advancing the maintenance of stable social relations under capitalism.

The diversity program at the University of Texas is a good example. In defending its program, the school says without it they will be forced to deny admission to some “elite” students, losing “the African-American or Hispanic child of successful professionals.”

Working people need to fight for desegregation of schools and housing, and affirmative action quotas in hiring and jobs, to strengthen the unity of our class.

1965 Voting Rights Act
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was another conquest of the mighty civil rights struggles of the 1950s and ’60s.

After the 1865 defeat of the Southern slavocracy in the Civil War, Blacks won the right to vote. “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” Congress decreed in the 15th Amendment to the Constitution in 1870.

But after the federal government withdrew union troops as part of the overthrow of Radical Reconstruction in 1876, state governments across the South, backed by the Ku Klux Klan and other extralegal racist gangs, enacted laws to impose strict racial segregation. Imposing Jim Crow by force and violence, they used everything from literacy tests to violent assault and lynching to eradicate the right of Blacks to vote.

Winning and extending the right to vote has been a hard-fought struggle by working people since the founding of the country, including fights to eliminate property qualifications and the fight for women’s suffrage.

Passage of the federal Voting Rights Act helped concretize what the overthrow of Jim Crow had accomplished — barring literacy tests, poll taxes and all other tools used by racist governments and parties to prevent Blacks from voting or running for office.

On June 25 the Supreme Court ruled on a challenge from Shelby County in Alabama that one section of the Act was unconstitutional. It did not touch the heart of the Act, which outlaws any discrimination in voting.

The section overturned contained a decades-old formula requiring certain state and local governments, including nine states in the South, to seek federal government approval before changing any election procedures.

Areas covered by the measures were those where “literacy and knowledge tests, good moral character requirements, the need for vouchers from registered voters, and the like” were in place and that had “less than 50 percent voter registration or turnout in the 1964 Presidential election.” It was defended as an extreme but necessary measure, initially to last for five years.

Since then Congress has extended the provision numerous times, most recently in 2006 when President George W. Bush signed bipartisan legislation to maintain it through 2031.

But, the Supreme Court said, each extension was based on th e facts as they stood in 1965. These conditions no longer exist, the court ruled. Registration rates for Blacks and Caucasians are roughly equal in all the areas covered by the provision. There has been a “1,000 percent increase since 1965 in the number of African-American elected officials” in the areas covered by the act.

The court held that in the future Congress could put state and local governments under the federal approval requirements, but only on the basis of current, not decades-old, facts.

The Black rights battles of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s that ended Jim Crow segregation did much more than deal a blow to voter disenfranchisement of African-Americans. Among the most important consequences, it opened the door to the decline of racist attitudes within the working class and to a deepening fraternization and sense of solidarity among working people of all backgrounds, overcoming the massive and lasting blow of the bloody defeat of Radical Reconstruction in the closing decades of the 19th Century.

In recent years, many efforts to use this section of the Voting Rights Act have focused on questions like redistricting, which have more than anything been an arena for jockeying between the Democratic and Republican parties seeking electoral advantage.

At the same time, in some areas concrete anti-working-class voter restrictions — which fall disproportionately on workers who are Black — have not only been maintained but in some cases expanded, from the imposition of photo identification requirements to denial of the right to vote for “felons.”

Two days after its voting rights decision, the Supreme Court vacated a federal court bar on a voter ID law in Texas, the most stringent in the country. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott announced the anti-working-class law “will take effect immediately.”  
 
 
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