One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy

by Carol Anderson

President Dwight Eisenhower’s “solution” to this Gordian knot, however, only pulled the rope tighter. In 1957, Attorney General Herbert Brownell, with a full assist from the wily junior senator from Texas, Lyndon Johnson, crafted and pushed through Congress the first civil rights bill in nearly ninety years. This was America taking care of the “unfinished business of democracy.” Except it wasn’t. The Civil Rights Act (1957), while seemingly a landmark piece of legislation, was actually a paper tiger that had no ability to protect the right to vote. The act did create the Civil Rights Commission, upgrade the Department of Justice’s section on civil rights to a division, and authorize the U.S. attorney general to sue those violating the voting rights of American citizens.91 But it was—by design and implementation—no match for the entrenched resistance to black citizenship.