Voting Rights

Essential Reading on Democracy: Dr. Carol Anderson’s One Person, One Vote

The concept of “One person, one vote” became a widely articulated core principle of the Constitution when it was first spoken by Chief Justice Earl Warren’s Supreme Court in 1963. In Dr. Carol Anderson of Emory University’s new book One Person, No Vote, the scholar exposes how this fundamental egalitarian principle of Constitutional law and its enforcement by the Civil Rights Act of 1965 has again become violated with shocking impunity throughout the American South. After the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby ruling which rolled back key protections of the Act, many states have implemented discriminatory measures which effectively disenfranchise large numbers of black voters. Along with Dr. Anderson’s seminal book White Rage, which chronicled the near-century of disenfranchisement that preceded the Civil Rights Act despite the ratification of the 15th Amendment in 1870, One Person, No Vote is essential reading for all citizens concerned with the resurgent anti-democratic pressures in our society.