Events of the past year have brought well-deserved attention to the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and the tremendous sacrifices made to advance voting rights for all Americans. Now, as we work to restore the Voting Rights Act to its full power, we can take valuable lessons from the decades of struggle after the VRA was passed. Many battles still had to be fought in federal court to remove systemic barriers to racial justice in local and county elections, bringing lawsuits against discriminatory electoral systems city by city and county by county. Between 1984 and 2004, committed NC organizations, particularly the NAACP, as well as individual citizens and their legal teams, brought 67 VRA voting rights cases against city and county governments, winning most of them.

 

This month's Fair Districts NC webinar will shine a light on this history and its lessons for our own times. We will review the record of VRA court battles brought at the local level assembled by Anita Earls (now Justice Earls) in a landmark 2008 report on North Carolina's VRA cases. 

 

We are honored to welcome Prof. Irving Joyner of NCCU's Law School, who will join us for a discussion on what we can learn from these fights for today's battle for fair representation in North Carolina as we head into this year's redistricting.