Created Equal: The right to vote wasn’t included in the Constitution. Why not?
On today’s episode, Stephen Henderson revisits a conversation with two voting rights experts about why the right to vote’s omission from the original Constitution has made access to the ballot a constant struggle for Black Americans.
President Lyndon Johnson greets Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., at the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Most Americans view the right to vote and to free and fair elections as fundamental to who we are as a nation and as a democracy. However, this right to vote was not part of the U.S. Constitution when it was written. This was an intentional move by the Founding Fathers.
On today’s episode of Created Equal, host Stephen Henderson revisits a conversation from the WDET Book Club with two voting rights experts, Bertrall Ross and Theodore Johnson, about why the right to vote’s omission from the original Constitution has made access to the ballot a constant struggle for Black voters.
This conversation originally aired on Detroit Today on July 28, 2021.
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Guests:
Bertrall Ross is a professor of law at the University of Virginia and a constitutional law expert who focuses on election law and voting rights. He says there was a push among Black women to have voting rights for women attached to the 15th Amendment, though it ultimately was not included. It was not until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that all African Americans gained wide access to the ballot.
“So what we see in terms of emerging at the time of the Voting Rights Act is the emergence of Black women as being an important political force from the 1960s to the present,” Ross said.
Theodore Johnson is a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, an institute at New York University that tracks changes in voting rights. He says the fight for voting rights has always been central to the way Black people vote because Black people have always had to vote for the party that will protect civil rights.
“They’ve never really been able to engage in the American democracy with the full agency of their worldviews around taxes or energy or education or health care because the voting rights fight has been so central to our participation in democracy,” Johnson said.
Listen to Created Equal with host Stephen Henderson weekdays from 9-10 a.m. ET on 101.9 WDET and streaming on-demand.
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