Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction - Review

Journal of Social History, Fall, 2001 by Stanley Cohen

Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction By J. Morgan Kousser (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. xii and 590 pp.).

In this book Kousser has accomplished two important related tasks. He summarizes the failure of the post Civil War Reconstruction to preserve the voting rights promised by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. Kousser published a much fuller account of that failure in The Shaping of Southern Politics (1974). His new analysis compares the post Civil War Reconstruction to the second which arose from the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s and from court desegregation decisions in that period.

The second task Kousser undertook in Colorblind Justice was to demonstrate that recent court decisions--especially those based on the Supreme Court's majority opinion in Shaw v. Reno (1993)--threaten to reverse the course of minority political success since the 1960s. To accomplish that task he made use of both exhaustive research and his experience as an expert witness in important court cases in five states dealing with redistricting and voting rights. This research and experience helped make Kousser a passionate critic of the present Supreme Court majority and its defenders. Without that passion he might not have accumulated such a vast amount of evidence and his book would have been less compelling.

Kousser shows, with the aid of voting statistics, that the Fifteenth Amendment and the Enforcement Acts authorized by it were reasonably effective. The number of southern African American legislators reached a peak of over 300 in the early 1870s. At about that point, however, fraud, in a large variety of forms, proved even more effective than violence in forcing the number of black votes and officeholders down. Kousser describes those fraudulent practices comprehensively and analyzes the way that fraud and violence complemented each other.

Kousser demonstrates that the process of undermining the achievements of the post Civil War Reconstruction continued until the end of the nineteenth century. "It was only then," he states, "that white supremacists finally felt relatively safe from the threat of black political power" (p. 15). Incremental change, such as gerrymanders, at the state, county and local level, often hardly noticed, gradually weakened efforts to enforce the Reconstruction Amendments.

The small margins by which elections, especially Congressional elections, were won during the late nineteenth century helped cause instability in officeholding which made consistency in national policy toward minority voting difficult. Also, Congress was divided so evenly between Democrats and Republicans that northern Democrats found it necessary to block Republican efforts to enlarge the number of African American voters in the South, almost all of whom voted for Republican candidates.

Kousser presents readers with excellent summaries of the Supreme Court decisions that, beginning in 1944, protected and extended African American voting rights. Readers will find fine summaries of the five sections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Congress' Amendments and extensions, and the great surge in African American voting which followed its enforcement. He describes also the similar effects when this crucial act was applied to Latinos.

Kousser provides more than enough evidence for his arguments to persuade most open minded readers. He has been criticized for overwhelming readers with too much information. I found his data useful and stimulating; but not everyone will want to read all of the detailed accounts of how legislative and administrative bodies (for example, school boards) have discriminated against minorities throughout the country, especially in Los Angeles, Memphis, Georgia, North Carolina and Texas.

Colorblind Justice contains severe criticism of the interpretations of the Voting Rights Act proposed by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, political scientist Abigail Thernstrom and the 5-4 majority Supreme Court opinion in Shaw v. Reno (1993) written by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. This decision and others based on it, Kousser argues, threaten to reverse the political advances made by minorities during the second half of the twentieth century.

The threat exists, and Kousser's experience as an expert witness in voting rights cases helped him describe it vividly. Teachers who want their students informed about these matters will find Kousser's accounts extremely valuable.