Voting Rights--and Wrongs: The Elusive Quest for Racially Fair Elections June 11, 2009

Hosts: American Enterprise Institute, the Federalist Society. The 1965 Voting Rights Act is the crown jewel of American civil rights legislation; its passage marked the death knell of the Jim Crow South. But that was the beginning, not the end, of an important debate on race and representation in American democracy. When is the distribution of political power racially fair? Who counts as a representative of black and Hispanic interests? These complex, unresolved questions are explored by Abigail Thernstrom, vice-chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, in her provocative new book, Voting Rights--and Wrongs: The Elusive Quest for Racially Fair Elections (AEI Press, June 2009), a legal and political analysis of the forty-year history of the Voting Rights Act.