What's good? You're listening to Code Switch, the show about race and identity from NPR.

I'm Gene Demby.

Okay, so it is really hard to overstate the significance of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Like really, really hard.

A lot of historians will tell you that the passage of that law basically

marked the beginning of actual real democracy in the United States, because before then,

it was a brutal business for people of color trying to cast ballots, especially black folks,

and especially in the South. There were lynchings, both the kind that happened in the dead of night,

and the kind that happened in broad daylight and public squares. People who tried to register

black voters regularly ended up dead. Megger Evers and Cheney and Goodman and Schwerner. And even

when there wasn't violence and intimidation, there were poll taxes and the so-called literacy

tests for voters that were really just nonsense

logic puzzles. And then came the Voting Rights Act, maybe the crown legislative achievement of the

civil rights movement. It changed the racial makeup of the ranks of elected officials around the

country. And again, especially in the South.

And the chance to have some say in how local and state and federal government worked,

finally opened up for almost everybody.

Take Tennessee. In the years just before the passage of the Voting Rights Act,

around 27% of all eligible black voters there were registered to vote.

Two years after this law was passed, it was 71%.

But over the last two decades, the Supreme Court under the watch of Chief Justice John Roberts,

who is, we should say, a very vocal opponent of the VRA, has been taking it apart brick by brick.

...