One Person, No Vote (YA edition): How Not All Voters Are Treated Equally

by Carol Anderson

Long an opponent of the Voting Rights Act, Roberts had clerked under Justice William Rehnquist, whose initial foray into voting rights prior to his ascent to the Supreme Court included a project to purge as many people of color as possible from voting rolls in Phoenix, Arizona. Rehnquist’s appointment to the bench only strengthened his opposition. In one case, the US Supreme Court had overturned a multiyear scheme in Rome, Georgia, that, without gaining preclearance approval, repeatedly annexed white areas to the city to reduce the electoral potential of black voters. Rehnquist was unfazed by the city’s (illegal) actions and instead depicted the VRA as simply black peoples’ way to get revenge on the heirs of slaveholders. “The enforcement provisions of the Civil War Amendments [Fourteenth and Fifteenth],” he wrote in his dissent, “were not premised on the notion that Congress could empower a later generation of blacks to ‘get even’ for wrongs inflicted on their forebears.”