60 Years of the VRA and the Renewed Urgency of Integrated Legal Advocacy

17 July, 2025

Contributed by -

Victoria Wenger

Attorney NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF)

Sixty years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act (“VRA”), this moment marks a critical time to embrace the lessons learned from the movement that brought about one of our nation’s most effective pieces of civil rights legislation. The integrated advocacy approach used to usher the passage of the VRA—one that required organizing, strategic communications, policy advocacy, and legal interventions—foreshadows the tactics that will be most essential to combat multi-pronged efforts to undermine our democracy and diminish Black political power today. Across communities and courthouses, from church basements to legislative chambers, the renewed fight for the right to vote must take lessons from the past to meet the demands of this moment—and there are many.

In 1965, the horrific scenes of Bloody Sunday captured the attention of a horrified national audience when media broke scheduled programming to cover the footage of state troopers violently assaulting peaceful marchers in Selma, Alabama.[1] The clash came as the marchers descended over the Edmond Pettus Bridge en route towards Montgomery, Alabama in an organized march to draw attention to the need for federal voting rights protections.[2] The organizing tactics employed by the marchers—and their sacrifices on that bridge—were amplified by media attention that drew new focus to the policy push to pass the VRA in Congress. However, it was a legal intervention that allowed the foot soldiers to fulfill the full march to Alabama’s State House weeks later.[3] Attorneys with the Legal Defense Fund and cooperating counsel filed Williams v. Wallace,[4] the case that advocated for the marchers’ assembly rights and outlined the march plans, which successfully cleared the way to complete the march and drew the necessary public attention and political pressure to usher the VRA’s passage.[5]

In the decades to follow, the VRA provided some of the nation’s most comprehensive, proactive and defensive safeguards against voter suppression and the dilution of Black voters’ political power nationwide and across the Deep South.[6] Those protections, however, have been systematically weakened in recent decades and continue to be under attack—renewing the need for integrated advocacy efforts to ensure the longevity of voting rights protections and our nation’s democratic principles.

In the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder ruling, the Supreme Court gutted the VRA formula which determined which states, based on their documented histories of suppressive acts, were required to undergo a “preclearance” process by submitting voting policy changes and district maps to the federal government before their enactment.[7] Congress has since failed to enact a new formula, despite proposals like the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.[8] In 2021, the Supreme Court again weakened the anti-discrimination enforcement provisions of the VRA in the Brnovich v. DNC decision, which dealt with the Act’s prohibition on policies that deny equal access to the political process based on a voter’s race.[9] While not wholesale rejecting these safeguards, the Court’s majority made the standards of proof required of plaintiffs substantially more burdensome.[10]

Despite these setbacks, court cases under the VRA have continued to be vital to both push back against suppression and to actively advance Black voting rights where they have been long held back. For example, after Black litigants challenged Alabama’s congressional map following the 2020 census because it included only one district where Black voters had an opportunity to elect their candidates of choice, the Supreme Court upheld decades of caselaw establishing the VRA framework to prove unlawful “vote dilution”—wherein a minority voting population is either packed into limited electoral districts or cracked across several, undermining their collective voting power.[11] Though redistricting battles continue, the Supreme Court’s 2023 Allen v. Milligan decision cleared the way for Black voters to have an opportunity to elect their candidates of choice in two additional congressional districts in 2024—one in Alabama and one in Louisiana, where similar litigation compelled the state legislature to redraw its congressional map.[12]

Meanwhile, however, lower courts have taken aim at the very right of private litigants to bring claims under Section 2 of the VRA (the operative statutory protection in these cases), threatening Black voters’ abilities to vindicate their rights and equally access the political process. Specifically, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit ruled in Arkansas State Conference of the NAACP v. Arkansas Board of Apportionment that Section 2 did not confer a private right of action—meaning that only the U.S. Department of Justice was empowered to bring these claims against state and local governments.[13] While the impact of the case has been largely, thus far, contained to the Eighth Circuit, it sets a worrisome precedent and emphasizes the drastic consequences of the Department of Justice’s recent abdication of voting rights enforcement efforts[14] and hemorrhaging of civil rights enforcement staff.[15] In the void, community engagement to push for stronger policy protections and private legal rights will be necessary to ensure communities are protected and civil rights attorneys are equipped with the tools needed to defend democracy.

The evolving voting rights precedents in the courts intersect with a multitude of other threats that span all branches of government. This year has been marked by multiple executive orders and memoranda from the White House, including efforts ranging from imposing new burdens on voter registration,[16] to intimidating the litigators who have been on the frontlines of defending voting rights.[17] On Capitol Hill, Congress has continued to fail to restore the full protections of the VRA while instead advancing policies like the SAVE Act in the House of Representatives, which seeks to impose burdensome and unnecessary documentary proof of citizenship requirements to register to vote.[18] In the face of strategic organizing, policy, and communications efforts, however, the SAVE Act has lost some momentum on the Senate side—a credit, once again, to integrated advocacy tactics.

In the face of these renewed threats to voting access, the legal community will be required to work in collaboration with communities nationwide to employ holistic advocacy tactics—from legislation to litigation, organizing and communications—to reenforce the urgency of the fight for voting rights. Sixty years after the passage of the VRA, the fight continues to protect its future. Indeed, the tactics to ensure its resilience are best informed by the integrated advocacy efforts that earned its existence.

[1] NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., LDF at Selma: The Voting Rights March of 1965, https://www.naacpldf.org/ldf-at-selma (last visited May 6, 2025) (hereinafter “LDF at Selma”).

[2] Id.

[3] Id.

[4] 240 F. Supp. 100 (M.D. Ala. 1965).

[5] Supra note 1, LDF at Selma.

[6] See U.S. Dep’t of Justice, About Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (Nov. 17. 2023), https://www.justice.gov/crt/about-section-5-voting-rights-act.

[7] 570 U.S. 529 (2013).

[8] H.R.14,119th Cong. (2025-2026).

[9] 594 U.S. 647 (2021).

[10] Id.

[11] See Allen v. Milligan, 599 U.S. 1 (2023).

[12] See NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Louisiana’s Fight for Fair Maps, https://www.naacpldf.org/wp-content/uploads/2025-03-14-Callais2-1.pdf (last visited May 8, 2025).

[13] 86 F.4th 1204 (8th Cir. 2023).