> To grasp the historical significance of what the Roberts Court has done, we must understand what America was prior to the civil rights revolution of the 1960s and the transformative impact of the Voting Rights Act. [...]
> On paper, the United States became a multiracial democracy almost exactly one hundred years earlier, with the passage of the Reconstruction amendments to the constitution after the end of the Civil War. [...]
> By 1867, well over 80 percent of Black men registered to vote across the South – more than half a million African Americans had joined the electorate by the early 1870s, meaning they outnumbered white voters across the former Confederacy. [...]
> "Redemption” was orchestrated by the white supremacist wing of the Democratic Party – and by organized terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan serving as “Redemption’s” paramilitary arm. They assaulted Black lawmakers and Black voters, targeted biracial local governments and legislatures. At least 2,000 African Americans were killed between 1865 and 1877 [...]
> Starting in the late 1880s, the Southern states rewrote their constitutions to ensure complete white domination. They passed voting laws that disenfranchised Black Americans via poll taxes, literacy tests, or property requirements. As a result, voter registration rates and Black turnout plummeted from around 80 percent to somewhere in the zero to five percent range, where they would remain until at least the 1940s. Black representation was extinguished. After 1881, the South did not elect another Black person to the Senate until 2013. After 1901, no Southern State sent any Black Representatives to the House until 72 years later.

https://steady.page/en/democracyamericana/posts/b0eafc14-f68d-4499-8108-b440bad1af7f