The Right to Vote: Protection or Suppression Since 1965

Less than a week before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the Gilder Lehrman Center hosted a panel discussion titled “The Right to Vote: Protection or Suppression Since 1965.” An article on the panel, History and Politics Concerning the Right to Vote in the United States, is available online. Panelist Ari Berman’s related article, Did Republicans Rig the Election?, appeared in the November 15, 2016 issue of The Nation.

The goal was to explore tensions between efforts to abridge and efforts to ensure the electoral franchise, focusing on the period between the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the present. To place current trends in voting suppression in historical context, patterns dating to the aftermath of the Civil War and the Reconstruction also were addressed.The panel, moderated by David W. Blight, Director, the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery and Abolition, Yale University, was comprised of the following presenters:

• Ari Berman, Political correspondent for The Nation magazine; investigative journalism fellow at the Nation Institute; and author of Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America
• Beverly Gage, Professor of History, Yale University
• Isela Gutiérrez-Gunter, Associate Research Director, Democracy North Carolina
• Kenneth Mack, Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law and Affiliate Professor of History at Harvard University and author of Representing the Race: The Creation of a Civil Rights Lawyer