On the weekend marking the 48th commemoration of Bloody Sunday, NAACP LDF President & Director-Counsel Sherrilyn Ifill appears on local Alabama television stations and reminds the nation of the continuing need for the Voting Rights Act.
View Ms. Ifill’s appearance here.
Fewer than fifty years ago, hundreds of citizens were brutally attacked as they attempted one of a series of marches from Selma to Montgomery to protest racial discrimination in voting and consequent exclusion of Black voters from the democratic process.
These demonstrators’ sacrifices resulted in Congress’s enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, considered one of the most important pieces of legislation in our nation’s history. The Voting Rights Act has since been reauthorized by Congress, and upheld by the U. S. Supreme Court, on four different occasions over the past four decades.
Currently, the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act is again under review by the U.S. Supreme Court in Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder.
The Court heard oral argument on February 27. LDF Special Counsel Debo Adegbile presented oral argument in defense of the Voting Rights Act, on behalf of six African-American voters in the case.
Learn more about the Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder case here and hear the Supreme Court oral argument here.
