Those successes, after decades of crushing, brutalizing disfranchisement, led “spokesmen for the white South” during the 1970 VRA reauthorization hearings to “claim … that the law had served its purpose and should be allowed to expire.”119 What was left unsaid, of course, was that the reason the Voting Rights Act worked was the advent of vigorous federal intervention, not because the racism that required the law in the first place had stopped.120
