Last Summer, we marked the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. Just a week after signing the bill that created Medicare, On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed a law that made it illegal for states and local jurisdictions to impede the voter registration process and deny the right to vote to African Americans.
This morning, we revisit a conversation about the history of the Voting Rights Act, and the future of voting rights, and we’ll assess the consequences of the 2013 Supreme Court decision that struck down one of its central tenets. Two scholars from Baltimore who have studied and written about these issues extensively joined me back in August. Taylor Branch is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the iconic history of the Civil Rights movement, America in the King Years. F. Michael Higginbotham is the Dean Joseph Curtis Professor of Law and the former Interim Dean at the University of Baltimore School of Law.
Taylor Branch is currently working with David Simon, Ta-Nehisi Coates and James McBride on a project to bring his King Trilogy to the screen in a four part HBO series. Michael Higginbotham's latest book is called Ghosts of Jim Crow: Ending Racism in Post-Racial America.
