History, Front and Center
We worked on this election-themed issue of Perspectives throughout a summer defined as much by Black Lives Matter protests and escalating attacks on Americans’ voting rights as by the COVID-19 pandemic. “We demand the right to vote, everywhere” and “stop brutality” signs, held aloft by Black people demonstrating outside the White House in 1965, are as relevant and necessary today as they were a half-century ago. In “So Far Away from 1965,” Julian Zelizer provides us with a history of the Voting Rights Act and outlines the various ways that its critics have succeeded in reversing its progress.
Photo: Library of Congress/Warren K. Leffler, 2014645538. Image cropped.
Staff
