Has California Gone Colorblind?

Despite the 1870 passage of the Fifteenth Amendment prohibiting denial or abridgement of the right to vote on account of race, the vast majority of African Americans in the southern United States were legally disfranchised by 1910, and most remained voteless in the Deep South in 1960. (Kousser, 1974; Lawson, 1976: 284) Because the timid 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts proved ineffectual in the face of the refusal of adamantly discriminatory state and local officials to allow even the most obviously qualified blacks to register to vote, the Civil Rights Movement pressed for a more radical and comprehensive statute. In 1965, after the Selma-to-Montgomery March, Congress responded by passing the Voting Rights Act (VRA) (Landsberg, 2007). Although white southern obstruction of black voting registration swiftly collapsed in the late 1960s, leaders of the old racial order adopted another tactic to hang onto power: They instituted new electoral structures, redrawing lines of local and state election districts to give them safe white majorities or shifting from district to at-large elections to ensure that small geographic areas where African Americans were in a majority were submerged in larger, overwhelmingly white election territories (Parker, 1990). In the 1969 case of Allen v. Board of Elections, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the VRA could be employed to attack such discriminatory structures, and Congress effectively endorsed the Court's interpretation when leading members and key committee reports explicitly approved the Allen decision during the debate over the extension of key provisions of the VRA in 1970 (Kousser, 1999: 56, 61)