Sixty-one years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law. It came less than a year after Freedom Summer, when volunteers registered Black voters across Mississippi and three of them, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, were murdered in Neshoba County for it. It came after Fannie Lou Hamer was beaten nearly to death in a Winona jail cell for trying to vote.
Sixty-one years later, the foundation that bill built — the promise that race should never determine whether your vote counts — is more fragile than it has been at any point since its passage.
Efforts to weaken the Voting Rights Act are not new, but they feel more urgent than ever
This spring, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in Louisiana v. Callais. This ruling has given lawmakers free range to draw districts that dilute the political power of Black and Latino voters, in Mississippi and across the South, with far less risk of a court stepping in.
In Congress, the SAVE Act (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act) would require every American to show proof of citizenship in person, just to register or update a voter registration. However, roughly half of Americans do not have a passport, and millions more do not have easy access to a certified birth certificate — not because they do not want one, but because $130 for a passport or a trip to a vital records office competes with rent, groceries, and gas money. Married women whose legal names do not match their birth certificates face an extra burden proving who they are. It functions, in practice, like a modern poll tax: a fee and a paperwork hurdle standing between an eligible citizen and the ballot box.
Mississippi lawmakers did not wait for Congress. This year, Governor Reeves signed the SHIELD Act into law, and it took effect on July 1. The law requires the Secretary of State to run Mississippi’s entire voter roll against a federal citizenship database every single year. Anyone flagged as a possible non-citizen has 30 days to track down a birth certificate, passport, or naturalization certificate and get it to their county circuit clerk, or risk losing their registration.
But it isn’t only the right to vote that’s at stake; it’s the fate of democracy.
A democracy only works when everyone’s voice is welcomed, not just the voices that go along with the administration. We are seeing a direct effort to silence, and strip the rights, of anyone who does not agree with the current administration – especially Black, Latino, API and women voters.
None of this is settled, and none of it happens without people. Here’s how you can protect the legacy of the Voting Rights Act:
- Check your registration status now — do not wait until November. Between roll maintenance, database mismatches, and new laws like the SHIELD Act, people are being quietly purged from the rolls without realizing it until they are turned away at the polls.
- If you are not registered, register to vote today. If you know someone who is not, help them do the same.
- Call your members of Congress and tell them where you stand on the SAVE Act and on restoring the Voting Rights Act’s protections.
- Show up in November. Every election you sit out is a decision made without you in the room.
The people this law was written for — Fannie Lou Hamer, the volunteers of Freedom Summer, and countless families across Mississippi — didn’t get to take the right to vote for granted. Sixty-one years later, neither can we.