The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is one of our nation’s most effective federal civil rights statutes. One of its most crucial components was upended in the 2013 Supreme Court case Shelby County vs. Holder.
In April 2010, Shelby County, Alabama filed a lawsuit seeking to invalidate Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which is widely regarded as the heart of the legislation. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) intervened in the case on behalf of African-American residents of Shelby County whose voting rights were directly impacted by the county’s challenge.
In 2006, the City of Calera, which lies within Shelby County, enacted a discriminatory redistricting plan without complying with Section 5, leading to the loss of the city’s sole African-American councilman, Ernest Montgomery. In compliance with Section 5, however, Calera was required to draw a nondiscriminatory redistricting plan and conduct another election in which Mr. Montgomery regained his seat.
Shelby County asked the U.S. Supreme Court to take the case following a May 2012 ruling by a federal court that upheld the constitutionality of Section 5. In rejecting Shelby County’s challenge, Judge Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, writing for the majority, ruled that Congress appropriately extended the protections of the preclearance requirement in 2006 for 25 more years: “After thoroughly scrutinizing the record and given that overt racial discrimination persists in covered jurisdictions notwithstanding decades of section 5 preclearance, we, like the district court, are satisfied that Congress’s judgment deserves judicial deference.”
The lawsuit challenging Section 5 was filed by Shelby County less than one year after LDF successfully defended its constitutionality before the Supreme Court in Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One v. Holder. LDF intervened to, once again, defend the Voting Rights Act.