In a New York Review of Books blog review of Gary May's
Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy
The statistics set forth in Roberts’s recent opinion persuasively explain why a neutral decision-maker could reasonably conclude that at long last the imposition of the preclearance requirement on the states that lost the Civil War—or more precisely continuing to use the formula that in 1965 identified those states—is not justified by the conditions that prevail today. The opinion fails, however, to explain why such a decision should be made by the members of the Supreme Court. The members of Congress, representing the millions of voters who elected them, are far more likely to evaluate correctly the risk that the interest in maintaining the supremacy of the white race still plays a significant role in the politics of those states. After all, that interest was responsible for creating the slave bonus when the Constitution was framed, and in motivating the violent behavior that denied blacks access to the polls in those states for decades prior to the enactment of the VRA.
As for Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy, Stevens notes an astonishing piece of information about the development of the Voting Rights Act:
I was surprised to learn from May that the proposals first advanced by the Kennedy administration, unlike the statute ultimately enacted under Johnson’s administration, would have limited the protection for the voting rights of blacks to those with a sixth-grade education. In response to Kennedy’s proposal, King’s followers “were furious. Southern States had prevented them from receiving an education equal to that of whites, and now they were being ‘punished’ for that denial at the ballot box.”
