Early Roots & Communist Ties

A key player in the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was the white, New York-based attorney Stanley Levison (1912-1979), a longtime secret member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) who in the 1950s aided in the legal defense of Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Starting in about 1945 or 1946, Levison devloped a reputation as CPUSA’s “financial angel,” and by 1953 or ’54 he began to assist the Party in the management of its finances. According to KeyWiki.org: “When Party treasurer William Weiner died in 1954, Levison became the interim chief administrator of the [P]arty’s highly secret funds. In this capacity he created business fronts to earn and launder money for the Party.”

In the 1950s as well, civil-rights activist and socialist/anti-capitalist Ella Baker, along with fellow activist and onetime Young Communist League member Bayard Rustin, introduced Levison to a young black preacher named Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968).  “A special relationship developed,” reports historian David Garrow. “F]rom the late 1950s until King’s death in 1968, it was without a doubt King’s closest friendship with a white person. In December of 1956 and January of 1957, Levison served as Rustin’s primary sounding board as Rustin drew up the founding-agenda documents for what came to be called the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.”

SCLC formally came into being on January 10-11, 1957, when, at the invitation of Martin Luther King Jr., some sixty black ministers and civil-rights activists met in Atlanta for the purpose of establishing a new civil-rights group whose strategies could be modeled on the successful tactics of the recently concluded Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott campaign.[1]  Emboldened by Rosa Parks‘ historic arrest for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery public bus in 1955, black boycotters who participated in that campaign refused — as a gesture of protest against racial segregation in the American South — to ride such buses as paying customers. In the Atlanta meeting, King and his five-dozen allies laid the foundation for an entity that they initially called the “Southern Leadership Conference on Transportation and Nonviolent Integration,” which would be tasked with coordinating anti-segregation protest activities in various locations across the South. The following month, the nascent organization shortened its name to “Southern Leadership Conference” and appointed Martin Luther King Jr. as its president. And then, in August 1957 it adopted what would become its permanent name, the “Southern Christian Leadership Conference,” to emphasize the group’s religious moorings.

From its earliest days, SCLC was a target of investigation by COINTELPRO, a covert counter-intelligence program that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) conducted from 1956 to 1971 to discredit and neutralize organizations that the U.S. government deemed subversive and dangerous to the nation’s political stability. Other notable targets of COINTELPRO included the Communist Party USA, the Socialist Workers Party, the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, the Ku Klux Klan, Students for a Democratic Society, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Brown Berets, the United Farm Workers, and the Young Lords. According to Britannica.com, the FBI’s tactics for gathering information about these entities included “intense surveillance, organizational infiltration, anonymous mailings, and police harassment.”

First Major Campaign: The Crusade for Citizenship

SCLC’s first major campaign was the Crusade for Citizenship, which began in late 1957 with the aim of educating and registering thousands of new Southern black voters as quickly as possible, so they could be eligibleto cast ballots in the upcoming 1958 and 1960 U.S. elections.

Shifting from a Color-Blind Ideal to Identity Politics

SCLC was instrumental to the success of the 1960s civil-rights movement, engineering activist campaigns that helped lay the groundwork for such legislation as the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Over time, however, the organization turned away from Dr. King’s colorblind ideal and embraced the increasingly tribalistic identity politics of the Democratic Party. It also became an outspoken critic of capitalism, a trend that King himself started when he addressed a number of SCLC gatherings in 1967 and: denounced “the evils of capitalism”; urged his listeners to “question the capitalistic economy” which he blamed for poverty in America; called for “a radical redistribution of economic and political power”; and asserted that “the whole structure of American life must be changed,” given the “racism, economic exploitation and militarism” that were its hallmarks.

Activist Campaigns of the 1960s

In 1961, SCLC supported the Freedom Rides where student activists from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) traveled on buses from Washington, D.C. to Jackson, Mississippi, to challenge segregation on interstate buses.

Also in 1961, SCLC initiated a Citizenship Schools program that focused on “providing reading and writing skills to people in rural areas [as] a stepping stone to civic engagement and voter registration.”

In 1962, SCLC conducted numerous voter-registration drives across the South. As the African-American activist and writer Jack O’Dell wrote that September: “Early in this fiscal year of 1962, SCLC set itself the longterm objective of doubling the Negro vote in the South. As the first milestone of this long range plan, we selected to work this year in parts of 8 southern states…. The results have been encouraging. In the first eight months of this program year, we aided 59 communities in the South with financial assistance, staff personnel and literature, and these communities added some 42,000 Negro voters to the voter registration rolls.”

In 1962 as well, SCLC launched its “Operation Breadbasket” program, a job-placement initiative that, according to Britannica.com: “aimed at improving the economic status of African Americans through a boycott of white-owned and white-operated businesses that refused to employ African Americans or to buy products sold by African American-owned businesses.”

In early 1963, SCLC launched its Birmingham Campaign — a.k.a. the Birmingham Movement or Birmingham Confrontation — whose purpose was to bring public attention to integration efforts in Birmingham, Alabama.

SCLC was one of six primary organizations that planned and sponsored the historic August 28, 1963 “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,” where Martin Luther King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. The other five principal collaborators were the NAACP, the National Urban League, the Congress of Racial Equality, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

In 1964, SCLC was a key player in the Mississippi Freedom Summer project, which sought to draw the nation’s attention to the racism and oppression that blacks in Mississippi faced on a regular basis.

In 1965, SCLC organized three 54-mile marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to advocate for black voting rights in the South.

In 1966, SCLC launched an “Open Housing” campaign in Chicago — a.k.a. the Chicago Freedom Movement — to address the issue of housing discrimination against blacks.

Between 1965 and 1968, SCLC actively protested against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

At the suggestion of Marion Wright Edelman, Martin Luther King in November 1967 announced the launch of SCLC’s “Poor People’s Campaign” which sought a “middle ground between riots on the one hand and timid supplications for justice on the other.” According to The New York Times, the aforementioned Communist Party member Stanley Levison was likewise “instrumental in giving Dr. King the idea for the Poor People’s Campaign.” King’s plan was to lead a group of some 2,000 poor people to Washington, D.C. to meet with government officials and demand a fair minimum wage as well as publicly funded jobs, education, and unemployment insurance. After King’s assassination in April 1968, SCLC proceeded with the Poor People’s Campaign under the leadership of Ralph Abernathy, who succeeded King as president of the organization. With Abernathy at the helm of SCLC, the Poor People’s Campaign brought some 3,000 people to camp out in a makeshift tent settlement in Washington for more than a month — from May 12 to June 24, 1968 — as a tactic to pressure federal legislators to pass laws that would support welfare programs guaranteeing the provision of employment, income, and housing for those living in poverty.

In 1968, SCLC organized the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike to support labor rights for Southern blacks. But when a massive protest on March 28 devolved into chaos and violence, Memphis mayor Henry Loeb called for martial law — resulting in the deployment of some 4,000 National Guard troops.

Rev. Jesse Jackson served as national director of SCLC’s “Operation Breadbasket” program from 1967-1971. But Jackson broke away from SCLC in ’71 when he and the organization’s president, Ralph Abernathy, clashed in a dispute over which of the two was more deserving of dictating not only the agendas of SCLC, but also the agendas of the civil-rights movement at large.

SCLC’s Presidents after Martin Luther King Jr.

After Dr. King’s successor, Ralph Abernathy, stepped down as SCLC president in 1977, the organization’s subsequent presidents were Joseph Lowery (1977-97), Martin Luther King III (1997-2004), Fred Shuttlesworth (2004), Charles Steele Jr. (2004-09), Byron Clay (interim president in 2009), Howard Creecy Jr. (2009-11), Isaac Newton Farris Jr. (2011-12), C.T. Vivian (interim president in 2012), Charles Steele Jr. (2012-24), and DeMark Liggins (2024-present).

The 1980s & 1990s

In 1984, SCLC launched an array of programs focusing on the promotion of educational equity and school desegregation, which had become major issues in American public discourse.

In 1988, SCLC participated in national anti-apartheid protests supporting U.S. economic sanctions against South Africa.

SCLC was outspoken about race-related matters in the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, addressing racial and economic inequalities that it attributed to intransigent defects in American society. Joe Hicks, who at that time was the executive director of SCLC’s Southern California chapter, said in October 1992:

“[P]eople participating in the Watts uprising in August, 1965 felt they were doing their part, if you will, for the struggle against discrimination and racism. And you heard that in communities wherever you went–destruction took place, but in the context of a struggle that people saw as being part and parcel of a larger struggle taking place in the country. If you fast-forward to the March 1991 beating of Rodney King, some of the same kind of conditions that started people in motion in the streets were exactly the same. Economic conditions were bad in 1965, and are even worse as we sit here in 1992. Police brutality was an everyday fact of life for Black and Brown people in this city…. The King beating in many ways symbolized to the Black community all that is wrong in this city and this country. That vision epitomized their daily lives–white cops brutalizing a Black, unemployed ex-convict. It happens every day, since 1965 and before.”

In 1996, SCLC endorsed and participated in Louis Farrakhan‘s so-called Million Man March, which was held at the National Mall in Washington, D.C and drew several hundred thousand attendees. Though officially billed as a “day of atonement,” a significant portion of the event focused on America’s historical and allegedly continuing assault on black people. “The real evil in America,” Farrakhan said that day, “is the idea that undergirds the setup of the Western world, and that idea is called white supremacy.”

The 2000s

In August 2003, SCLC issued a press release declaring its intention to take a “stand against increased U.S. militarism, racism, class warfare, the destruction of the environment and a so-called ‘War on Terrorism’ that justifies the arrests of innocent people and instills fear in all Americans.”

When Republican President George W. Bush visited Martin Luther King Jr.’s grave in January 2004 and laid a wreath in honor of the late civil-rights leader, SCLC’s interim president, Fred Shuttlesworth, denounced Bush’s visit as a cynical political gambit by a president whose “slippery politics” had “consistently contradicted the philosophy and principles” of Dr. King.

In March 2004, Shuttlesworth and SCLC came to the defense of Haitian dictator Jean-Bertrand Aristide — denouncing the overthrow of the Haitian regime (which had a long record of human-rights abuses) and demanding an investigation into America’s role in Aristide’s ouster.

In the run-up to the 2004 U.S. presidential election, SCLC, paying no heed to its founder’s counsel against trying to “influence” people “to vote for any particular party,” rallied support for Democratic candidate John Kerry. Alleging that African Americans had been disenfranchised en masse in the Florida recount controversy of 2000, the organization unveiled a get-out-the-vote drive in Florida, under the banner of a “Truth and Justice Campaign.”

Just days after President George W. Bush’s November 2004 re-election, SCLC underwent a public-relations crisis when Fred Shuttlesworth resigned his post as interim president, stating that “[f]or years, deceit, mistrust and a lack of spiritual discipline and truth have eaten away at the core of this once-hallowed organization.” He accused SCLC leadership—specifically, vice chairman Raleigh Trammell—of financial mismanagement and personal impropriety. Those charges provoked an indignant and invective-laden inter-office memo from Trammel which said: “If I decide to curse you out nigga, I will…. [As] for you, you are still a bastard.”

In 2008, SCLC sponsored a “Democracy Behind Bars” initiative to register incarcerated blacks who were eligible to vote in political elections.

Defending Socialist & Marxist Radicals

Over the years, SCLC has been an outspoken defender of Leonard Peltier, the American Indian Movement activist who served a long prison sentence for the 1975 murders of two FBI officers. Throughout Peltier’s incarceration, SCLC portrayed him as a political prisoner who deserved to be released from custody immediately.

Similarly, former SCLC president Martin Luther King III has emphasized the organization’s longstanding “commitment to justice for Mumia Abu-Jamal,” the Marxist, former Black Panther, and convicted cop-killer. Blaming “bias in the criminal justice system” for Mumia’s conviction, King in 2016 referred to Mumia as “an innocent man” and “our brother.” “We must stand by Abu-Jamal’s side just as we stood by the sides of Nelson Mandela, Angela Davis, Ben Chavis, and Joann Little,” said King.

Opposed to Capital Punishment

Former SCLC president Martin Luther King III asserts that SCLC is “unequivocally opposed to capital punishment,” a practice he describes as part of an “evil system of injustice” by which America discriminates unfairly against nonwhites.

According to an October 2011 article published by Emory University Libraries, Fred Taylor, who served as SCLC’s Director of Direct Action from 1984 until at least 2005, “took an interest in working towards the abolition of the death penalty, serving as a volunteer for Amnesty International and a board member for the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. Under his leadership, SCLC became an outspoken and passionate voice in the fight against the death penalty.”

SCLC’s Priorities as of 2015

As of the year 2015, SCLC stated that its organizational priorities were to:

• “promote spiritual principles within our membership and local communities”;
• “educate youth and adults in the areas of personal responsibility, leadership potential, and community service”;
• “ensure economic justice and civil rights in the areas of discrimination and affirmative action”;
• “eradicate environmental classism and racism wherever it exists”;
• “stand as an advocate for those on the margins of society”; and
• “awaken and strengthen the moral conscience of this country to the growing catastrophe of childhood incarceration and the obvious social unrest in under-funded and developing socioeconomic areas in rural or urban centers.”

Supporting Bernie Sanders & His Dark View of America

On July 15, 2015, SCLC hosted then-Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders for a speech in which he portrayed America as a nation thoroughly infested with racism and injustice against black and low-income people. Some key excerpts from Sanders’ speech:

• “The American people are sick and tired with establishment politics, with establishment economics and with establishment media. They’re sick of being told that they don’t matter. They fully understand that corporate greed is destroying our economy, that American politics is now dominated by a handful of billionaires and that much of the corporate media is prepared to discuss everything except the most important issues facing our country.”
• “[I]t is useless to try to address race without also taking on the larger issue of inequality. [Dr. King] was planning a poor people’s march on Washington that would include not only African-Americans but also Latinos, Native Americans and poor Appalachian whites. He envisioned a rainbow of the dispossessed, assembled to demand not just an end to discrimination but a change in the way the economy doles out its spoils…. And that is the theme that I wish to pursue this evening. The need to simultaneously address the structural and institutional racism which exists in this country, while at the same time we vigorously attack the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality which is making the very rich much richer while everyone else – especially the African-American community and working-class whites – are becoming poorer.”
• “Too many African-Americans today are simultaneously having to deal the crisis of racial justice while coping with the effects of poverty and economic deprivation, such as drugs, crime, and despair. Of course the majority of people of color are trying to work hard, play by the rules and raise their children. But there are neighborhoods where mothers are afraid to let their children outside for fear of gang violence and drugs. And they are also afraid of their children being targeted by the police because of the color of their skin. No person should have to worry that a routine interaction with law enforcement will end in violence or death…. Across the nation, too many African-Americans and other minorities find themselves subjected to a system that treats citizens who have not committed crimes, like criminals. A growing number of communities do not trust the police and police have become disconnected from the communities they are sworn to protect…. People are angry. I am angry. And people have a right to be angry. Violence and brutality of any kind, particularly at the hands of law enforcement sworn to protect and serve our communities, is unacceptable and must not be tolerated.”
• “We must reform our criminal-justice system. Black lives do matter. And we must value black lives. We must move away from the militarization of police forces. We must invest in community policing…. We need a federal initiative to completely redo how we train police officers in this country and give them body cameras.”
• “For people who have committed crimes that have landed them in jail, there needs to be a path back from prison. The federal system of parole needs to be reinstated. We need real education and real skills training for the incarcerated.”
• “We must end the over incarceration of non-violent young Americans who do not pose a serious threat to our society. It is an international embarrassment that we have more people locked up in jail than any other country on earth – more than even the Communist totalitarian state of China. That has got to end.”
• “The war on drugs has been a failure and has ruined the lives of too many people. African-Americans comprise 14 percent of regular drug users but are 37 percent of those arrested for drug offenses. From 1980 to 2007, about one in three adults arrested for drugs was African-American. It is an obscenity that we stigmatize so many young Americans with a criminal record for smoking marijuana, but not one major Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for causing the near collapse of our entire economy. This must change.”
• “[T]here are still those who seek to terrorize the African American community with violence and intimidation. We need to make sure the federal resources are there to crack down on the illegal activities of hate groups. We need a new social movement to let all the racist haters out there know that they will no longer be accepted in a civilized society.”
• “Black children, who make up just 18 percent of preschoolers, account for 48 percent of all out-of-school suspensions before kindergarten. We are failing our black children before kindergarten! Black students were expelled at three times the rate of white students. Black girls were suspended at higher rates than all other girls and most boys. According to the Department of Education, African American students are more likely to suffer harsh punishments – suspensions and arrests – at school.”
• “Today, we live in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, but that reality means little because almost all of that wealth is controlled by a tiny handful of individuals. There is something profoundly wrong when the top one-tenth of 1 percent owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent, and when 99 percent of all new income goes to the top 1 percent…. This grotesque level of inequality is immoral. It is bad economics. It is unsustainable. That is why we need a tax system that is fair and progressive, which makes wealthy individuals and profitable corporations begin to pay their fair share of taxes.”
• “Voter suppression today is alive and well in the form of unnecessary voter ID laws, restrictions on registering to vote, improper purging of voter rolls, felon disenfranchisement, and a staggering array of deceptive practices that are preventing eligible voters from participating in the political process. It is embarrassing that the United States’ voting system is so dysfunctional…. We need to extend early voting, extend voting hours, make Election Day a holiday or move it to a weekend.”
• “And when we talk about voting rights, we have to address the reality of over 2 million African-Americans who have been disenfranchised due to criminal convictions. This is not the way to help bring people returning from prison back into their communities.”

Supporting The Black Lives Matter Movement

In 2012, SCLC publicly announced its support for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and its professed efforts to combat systemic racism and police violence against blacks.

In 2014, SCLC leaders and supporters took part in protests against an August 9, 2014 incident in Ferguson, Missouri where a 28-year-old white police officer named Darren Wilson had shot and killed an 18-year-old black male named Michael Brown during an altercation that made national headlines and set off a massive wave of BLM-led demonstrations and riots. After the St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert M. McCulloch announced that Officer Wilson would not be prosecuted in connection with Brown’s killing, SCLC president Charles Steele Jr. said: “The grand jury’s decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson is not an end but just another painful step in the long journey to justice, a journey that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., our founding president, and others walked with confidence and determination. Just as SCLC did not give up until the buses were desegregated in Montgomery, Alabama under Dr. King’s leadership, we will not give quit until justice is the norm in America instead of the exception in the deaths of our unarmed Black men and women.”

In April 2015, SCLC terminated Rev. Sam Mosteller as president of its Georgia chapter after he said that, in light of a series of then-recent police shootings of black males in separate cities, the organization would have been well-advised to abandon its traditional commitment to nonviolent ideals. “You know, the SCLC stands for nonviolence, but nonviolence hasn’t worked in this instance,” said Mosteller. “I am going to have to advocate, at this point, that all African-Americans advocate their 2nd Amendment rights” — in order to protect themselves from predators and criminals in law enforcement.

Following the infamous death of George Floyd in a May 2020 altercation with a white Minneapolis police officer, SCLC participated in nationwide BLM protests and called for reforms in policing as well as the criminal-justice system at large. SCLC Pastor Thembekila Coleman-Smart said to a crowd in downtown Los Angeles on June 2, 2020: “Did you hear George Floyd call for his mother? I am his mother. I am his daughter. ‘Vengeance is mine,’ sayeth the lord. I am here on behalf of his [Floyd’s] mom whose name he cried out in his last breath. I can breathe, and I will speak, and I will stand and I will bleed the blood of Jesus until racism comes down.”

Protesting the Alleged “Racism” of Corporate America

SCLC boasts that throughout the course of its history, it has staged numerous protests outside the headquarters of “corporations in the U.S. that have been accused of racism and discriminating against Blacks and other employees of color.”

Moreover, the organization has often used such demonstrations as opportunities to make pro-Democrat, anti-Republican political statements. For example, in a January 29, 2021 SCLC press release announcing a planned demonstration outside the headquarters of the Nielsen Holdings company, then-SCLC president Charles Steele Jr. praised the newly elected U.S. President, Democrat Joe Biden, as a man “who truly understands what it takes to heal our country and make America better.” Biden’s worthiness of being entrusted with such an awesome responsibility, said Steele, was evidenced by the fact that he already had “started reversing executive orders by his predecessor [Donald Trump] that were meant to hamper progress for people of color.” The January 29th press release further stated:

“Over the past few years, some of the world’s top corporations, such as McDonalds, Google, Morgan Stanley, Uber, UPS, Target, Pinterest and Coca-Cola have been hit with lawsuits for discrimination and racism…. [N]early all the Fortune 500 companies have paid settlements in a discrimination or sexual harassment lawsuit since 2000. In 2019, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission received more than 72,000 complaints about racial, sex, age, religious and other types of discrimination. But these lawsuits have not changed the culture inside corporate America. Executives, according to the report, have made virtually no progress in closing the wage gap across the country since the early 2000s.”

Promoting the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act

In 2021, SCLC supported the passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. See Endnote #2 for some key excerpts from an October 2020 analysis of this legislation by Heritage Foundation scholar Hans A. von Spakovsky.[2]

SPLC’s Major Programs as of 2026

As of June 2026, SPLC administered 6 major ongoing programs. These initiatives are enumerated below, each one accompanied by SPLC’s brief description:

(1) National SCLC: re-MEMBER the Movement: “Through this program, SCLC travels to select cities and sponsors a weekend of activities that help communities remember their unique and rich histories and their part in the advancement of civil rights and social justice.”

(2) Five Bricks: Building the Beloved Community Across the Diaspora: “The Five Bricks Initiative is an economic development vision of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference that seeks to reconnect Black Americans with the global African diaspora through commerce, entrepreneurship, and community exchange…. Our first point of partnership is the nation of Burundi, a country with extraordinary potential and a remarkable coffee crop. Burundi represents what many nations across the diaspora face: tremendous natural resources and gifted people, yet limited access to global markets. Five Bricks aims to change that by creating direct trade relationships that benefit communities on both sides of the ocean. Young entrepreneurs in the United States will come to their local SCLC chapter, receive five bricks of coffee at a time, sell them to consumers, and use their earnings to purchase their next set. This creates a cycle of economic activity that supports families abroad while building opportunity and financial confidence for young people at home. With each sale, the program strengthens the bond between the diaspora and encourages shared prosperity.”

(3) Christian Lead: “Christian Lead is a national initiative … grounded in the enduring truth of 1 Corinthians 13. It calls on Christian leaders to live out their faith in public life through civic responsibility, community engagement, and compassionate leadership…. Christian LEAD’s [various initiatives] … empowe[r] leaders to build the Beloved Community envisioned by Dr. King—connecting diverse communities, fostering collaboration, and advancing justice, human dignity, and lasting social transformation.”

(4) SCLC V.O.T.E.S.: “The SCLC V.O.T.E.S. program is an essential part of our ongoing commitment to ensuring that every eligible American is not only able to exercise their right to vote but is also informed and engaged in the electoral process…. It is more important than ever to equip voters with the knowledge and tools they need to make informed decisions … by offering comprehensive training sessions that cover everything from the mechanics of voting to a deep dive into the key issues on the ballot.”

(5) SCLC Poverty Tour: “SCLC Poverty Tour in 2026 is a national effort [that] will travel to key communities to confront the realities of poverty, lift the voices of those most affected, and press leaders in every sector toward real solutions rooted in justice, opportunity, and human dignity. The tour is designed to shine a national light on systems that keep people in poverty and to help communities move from crisis to change.”

Footnotes:

[1] Among those who participated in King’s January 1957 meeting in Atlanta were such notables as Charles Kenzie Steele, Fred Shuttlesworth, Joseph Lowery, Ralph Abernathy, Ella Baker, and Bayard Rustin.

[2] The following excerpts are from an October 2020 analysis of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act by Heritage Foundation scholar Hans A. von Spakovsky:

“In the latest attempt to amend the Voting Rights Act, Senator Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.) recently introduced the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act…. The real aim is to reverse the 2013 Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder and to give the political allies of Democrats—the radicals who inhabit the career ranks of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department […], and advocacy groups such as the ACLU—control over state election rules….

“The Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) … helped eliminate the widespread discriminatory practices that were preventing African Americans from registering and voting in the 1960s. There are no longer any such barriers or practices that block black Americans (or anyone else) from registering and voting, despite the mythical claims of ‘voter suppression’ promulgated by the Left. In the 2012 presidential election, for example, blacks voted at a higher rate than whites nationally (66.2 percent vs. 64.1 percent), according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

“The main provision of the VRA is Section 2, which prohibits any voting ‘standard, practice or procedure . . . which results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color’ or membership in certain language-minority groups. It is permanent, applies nationwide, and can be enforced by the Justice Department as well as private parties. It was also completely unaffected by the Shelby County decision and remains in full force today.

“Shelby County dealt specifically with Section 4 of the VRA, which determined the states and smaller jurisdictions that were subject to Section 5 preclearance. The coverage formula was based on a jurisdiction’s having voter registration and turnout by all voters of less than 50 percent in the 1964, 1968, or 1972 elections. The formula was designed to capture states engaging in blatant discrimination by taking into account black voters’ low registration and turnout caused by those discriminatory practices.

“Congress did not update the coverage formula in 2006. Why not? Perhaps because, if it had, all of the covered jurisdictions—mostly (but not exclusively) southern states—would have dropped out of the Section 5 preclearance requirement owing to the vast improvement of voting conditions since 1972. By 2006, the registration and turnout rates of black voters were on par with or even exceeded those of white voters in many of the covered states. So states such as Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi remained under the onerous preclearance requirement based on information that was almost 40 years out of date.

“But the Left loved Section 5 because of the central role played in its enforcement by its friends and political allies in the career ranks of the Civil Rights Division, many of whom were hired from the ACLU, the NAACP, and other groups allied with the Democratic Party. They could easily refuse to preclear any voting change opposed by the Left—such as voter-ID laws—without having to go to court with a Section 2 lawsuit, where they would have to prove that a law was discriminatory.

“The Supreme Court ruled that Section 5 was unconstitutional because it had not been updated in 2006 to reflect modern conditions. The Su­preme Court said, ‘History did not end in 1965, . . . yet the coverage formula that Congress reauthorized in 2006 . . . ke[pt] the focus on decades-old data relevant to decades-old problems, rather than current data reflecting current needs.’

“According to the Supreme Court in Shelby County, because Section 5 blatantly invades state sovereignty over elections, Congress would, in order to justify its continuation, have to show that there were still ‘blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal decrees,’ ‘voting discrimination on a pervasive scale,’ or ‘flagrant’ or ‘rampant’ voting discrimination. None of that was present in 2013 when the case was before the Supreme Court, and there is no evidence of such behavior today, either.

“Yet the Leahy bill would reimpose the Section 5 preclearance based on a new coverage formula even more onerous than the prior one and keep the D.C.-court requirement as if it were still 1965. States would be covered in their entirety for ten years if the attorney general determined that ten ‘voting-rights violations’ occurred during a 25-year period, even if the state was responsible for only one of them and the rest were committed by city or county governments over which the state had no authority.

“Voting-rights violations would in­clude objections made by the attorney general, which don’t require any finding of intentional discrimination. A claimed discriminatory effect based purely on a statistical disparity would count as a violation. Such ‘disparate impact’ liability has been misused in many areas besides voting. The Justice Department has a troubling history under Section 5 of making unwarranted objections and being castigated by courts for its behavior, as evidenced by a 2012 federal-court decision overturning the DOJ’s frivolous objection to South Carolina’s voter-ID law.

“Consent decrees and lawsuit settlements would also count as voting-rights violations. This would provide an incentive for the Justice Department and advocacy groups to file as many lawsuits as possible against states, even if they had little or no merit, in order to obtain quick settlements that could then be used to trigger preclearance coverage.

“In addition, the Leahy bill would make it almost impossible for any state or local jurisdiction to defend itself against a lawsuit filed by the Justice Department or an advocacy group such as the ACLU. It would create a unique and novel legal standard for injunctive relief. Courts would be directed to grant an injunction under the VRA if the plaintiff had ‘raised a serious question’—as opposed to providing actual evidence—about whether the challenged voting change violated the VRA or the Consti­tution. This is like requiring a defendant in a criminal case to prove his innocence because the government simply claims he violated the law.

“Since the Shelby decision, there has been a false clamor about a supposed loss of voting rights. That is a myth created by the Left and abetted by the media. That myth has been perpetuated as a way of opposing reforms intended to improve the integrity of the election process, such as voter-identification requirements and the cleanup of state­wide voter-registration lists, and to justify the reimposition of federal control over state election procedures by reviving the Section 5 preclearance requirement.

“There is no voter-suppression epidemic. Americans today have an easier time registering and voting than at any time in our nation’s history. On the increasingly rare occasions when discrimination actually occurs, Section 2 of the VRA provides a more than adequate remedy. The Leahy bill is unjustified and unneeded, and would be a dangerous violation of state sovereignty.”