It was a fight Roberts would continue decades later, when he replaced Rehnquist as chief justice and authored the majority opinion in a landmark case gutting the VRA in 2013. Fifty years after the passage of the landmark civil rights law, and 35 years after he first worked so hard to dismantle it, Roberts remains at the center of an impassioned debate about voting rights in America, one that shows no signs of ending anytime soon.
The Supreme Court’s initial weakening of the VRA began in Mobile, Alabama.
In 1925, thirty years before Rosa Parks declined to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, John LeFlore, a 25-year-old postal worker in Mobile, refused to give up his seat on a segregated streetcar to a white man. A scuffle ensued, and both men were arrested. The white man was promptly released while LeFlore remained in jail. The experience persuaded LeFlore to start a Mobile chapter of the NAACP.
Fifty years later, LeFlore visited the law office of Vernon Crawford, Mobile’s foremost black civil rights lawyer, and asked him to file a lawsuit challenging the structure of the city’s governing commission and school board. Despite African Americans’ constituting a third of the port city’s population, no black had ever been elected to a position of prominence in Mobile, because since 1911 city officials had been elected citywide, rather than from specific districts. That meant no black candidate could be elected without significant white support, which had never been forthcoming, and no white candidate with substantial black support had a realistic chance of winning office, either. Even after the passage of the VRA in 1965, blacks were shut out from influence in Alabama’s third-largest city.
LeFlore’s friend Wiley Bolden, a World War I veteran and insurance agent who had cofounded the Mobile NAACP, became the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, which charged that Mobile’s government violated Section 2 of the VRA, a little-used provision whose language mirrored the Fifteenth Amendment. Unlike Section 5 of the law, which covered only select southern states, on a temporary basis, and gave the federal government the power to preemptively block discriminatory voting changes filed after 1965, Section 2 applied nationwide, on a permanent basis; put the burden of proof on plaintiffs to show that a voting change was discriminatory; and could be used to challenge electoral structures adopted before 1965, as was the case in Mobile.
After the lower courts ruled in favor of Bolden, finding that the city’s election system discriminated against African Americans, Mobile appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The debate revealed a fundamental divide about how much protection the VRA provided for minority voters and whether the right to vote stopped at the ballot box or extended to the halls of power.