Democracy, Race, and Multiculturalism in the Twenty-First Century: Will the Voting Rights Act Ever Be Obsolete
![handle is hein.journals/wajlp22 and id is 77 raw text is: Democracy, Race, and Multiculturalism in the
Twenty-First Century: Will the Voting Rights Act
Ever Be Obsolete?
Sheryll D. Cashin*
In 2005 our nation marked the fortieth anniversary of the passage
of the Voting Rights Act. ' This comes on the heels of other august
celebrations that remind us of what the civil rights revolution
wrought: the fortieth anniversaries of the March on Washington and
the Civil Rights Act of 1964; and the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v.
Board of Education.2 Elsewhere I have written about the modem
meaning of these milestones, and the challenges that remain.3 In this
essay I reflect on the impact of the Voting Rights Act (the Act) and
what growing racial diversity portends for American democracy in
the twenty-first century. There is much to celebrate. Within a few
years of the Act's passage roughly a million new voters were
registered in the South.4 In Mississippi, in the wake of the Act, black
* Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center. This essay expands on a
lecture I gave as the University Distinguished Visiting Scholar, a Public Interest Law Speakers
Series Lecturer, and the Black Law Students Association Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Commemorative Speaker at Washington University in St. Louis on January 18, 2006. 1 would
especially like to thank Karen Tokarz for honoring me with the invitation to lecture and visit,
and the many faculty and students of numerous disciplines at Washington University who gave
me feedback on these and other ideas. The stimulation was invaluable. I would also like to
thank those of the law faculties at Georgetown and Boalt Hall who attended presentations of
this paper. I am especially thankful to Mike Seidman and Ian Haney-Lopez for their insightful
comments. Finally, many thanks to my research assistant, Elias Salameh, for his very helpful
assistance in writing this essay.
1. Voting Rights Act, 42 U.S.C. §§ 1971-1974 (2000).
2. 349 U.S. 294 (1955).
3. See, e.g., SHERYLL CASHIN, THE FAILURES OF INTEGRATION: How RACE AND CLASS
ARE UNDERMINING THE AMERICAN DREAM (2004) [hereinafter CASHIN, THE FAILURES OF
INTEGRATION]; Sheryll D. Cashin, Shall We Overcome? Transcending Race, Class, and
Ideology Through Interest Convergence, 79 ST. JOHN'S L. REV. 253 (2005) [hereinafter Cashin,
Shall We Overcome?].
4. ALEXANDER KEYSSAR, THE RIGHT TO VOTE: THE CONTESTED HISTORY OF
DEMOCRACY IN THE UNITED STATES 264 (2000); see also BERNARD GROFMAN ET AL.,](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/wajlp22&div=8&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Democracy, Race, and Multiculturalism in the Twenty-First Century: Will the Voting Rights Act Ever Be Obsolete
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