FREE ESSAY ON ALONG RACIAL LINES BY DAVID MICHEAL HUDSON

ALONG RACIAL LINES BY DAVID MICHEAL HUDSON

In Hudson?s ambitious study he identifies two major temporal consequences of the 1965
Voting Rights Act (VRA): one good, one bad. First, the VRA, part of President Johnson?s
Great Society initiative, increased the democratic participation of blacks by ensuring
them equal access to voting booths in Southern states. Second, racist intimidation in the
form of invidiously administered literacy tests, constitutional interpretation tests and
other obstacles imposed by whites had prevented blacks from registering to vote in many
Southern states (most notoriously Mississippi). 
Fortification of the 15th amendment was, in Hudson?s view, accomplished within the first
five years of the VRA, as black registration in the South increased from 29% in 1965 to
56% in 1970. What followed on the heels of this victory, however, was nothing short of
the accelerated unraveling of Martin Luther King?s dream of racial assimilation. Never
mind that King?s dream was more complicated than simplistic assimilation. Today we live
the nightmare of a society hemmed along racial lines. 
Who is to blame? To a large extent, Hudson?s culprits are civil rights leaders who have
stretched the original intent of the VRA to encompass affirmative action measures such as
race-based redistricting and bilingual ballots. Consequently, race-based segregation
calcifies and racial sensitivities proliferate in an atmosphere of political correctness.
And Hudson watches a good plan go sour. They [civil rights leaders] drove Congress to
extend its [the VRA?s] life and amend its scope every few years and were aided by federal
courts who interpreted the act and its constitutional underpinnings in the broadest, most
encompassing ways. The Voting Rights Act evolved into an affirmative action program that
contradicted the dream of assimilation. 
While this is not a new argument, Hudson?s effort to make his case is novel and
intriguing. In addition to providing a thorough and thus extremely informative account of
the legislative history, the political debates and the role played by federal courts in
shaping the 1965 VRA and its subsequent amendments and extensions, Hudson engages in a
comparative study of how these developments played out in three particular communities.
He chooses Dallas, Texas to represent the struggle for blacks for representation in city
government, Dade County, Florida to depict the assumption of power by Hispanic
immigrants, and the Navajo Reservation in Arizona to show changes in the political
influence of the largest tribe of Native Americans.
The first two chapters give a clear and concise primer on the nuts and bolts of U.S.
elections, a good introduction for those new to the field of voting rights and a handy
refresher for everyone else. Bullet notes on key terms such as multi-member/at large
districts, annexations and district boundaries also helped. Other chapters began with the
political and legislative history of successive steps in what Hudson calls the
voting-rights journey and go on to supplement those histories with stories from Dallas,
Arizona and Dade County. These stories from the field put human faces on the larger
narrative Hudson relates. In early chapters Hudson weaves these two techniques together
brilliantly, infusing the events leading up to the passage of the VRA with the specific
histories of blacks in Dallas, Hispanics in Dade County and Native Americans on the
Navajo Reservation in Arizona. 
This methodology loses some of its steam in later chapters, however, as Hudson focuses
more and more intently on the personal idiosyncrasies of individual civil rights leaders
and players that seem irrelevant to the bigger picture he is trying to paint. For
example, in the course of describing a 1988 law suit against the city of Dallas alleging
that single-member districts should supplant multi-member districts to increase minority
voting power, Hudson portrays Roy Williams, one of the plaintiffs, in the following way:
Roy Williams, a six-foot-six, forty-seven-year-old black, was a self-employed Dallas
businessman who had run for city council but had been defeated by a white candidate in an
at-large race. He had been found guilty of driving while intoxicated three times, but
later claimed to have had a spiritual awakening which led him into counseling others for
substance abuse. He lived in a north Dallas condominium, ate at the French bakery near
SMU, and toted a book bag filled with books on spiritualism and philosophy. Williams
described himself as a spiritualist who meditated five hours a day, and claimed he had
begun fasting to focus his attention on the trial. 
Rather than supporting Hudson?s claim that civil rights leaders stretched the VRA beyond
its original purposes, these kind of journalistic forays detract from issues germane to
the legitimate question of whether or not the amendments and extensions to the 1965 VRA
have gone too far. There is much room for reasonable people to disagree over this
question, but Hudson?s case against the post-1965 voting-rights journey is weakened by
these digressions. The persuasiveness of Hudson?s thesis is further undermined by copious
use of polemical terms like political correctness, special rights and the liberal agenda.
Hudson lets these sound bites stand in for serious intellectual arguments that would
enrich the sort of conservative position he stakes out. He summons the work of Abigail
Thernstrom to support his argument against the 1975-minority language provision amendment
to the VRA, which mandated that voting materials be printed and distributed in both
English and the minority language spoken by at least five percent of the voting
population in a particular voting subdivision. But a deeper probing of conservative
thinking on this issue would have yielded more substantial argumentation.
Assertions rather than supported argument occur in many places throughout Hudson?s study.
For example, the analogy that Hudson draws between Native Americans on the Navajo
Reservation and white ethnics in Boston rings hollow without evidence or attention to
counter-claims. There is no reason to suspect that the Navajo culture would be lost with
the demise of the reservation. Look in Boston to see if the Irish or Italian cultures
were lost. 
Some critical attention to the unmeltability argument is essential for the kind of
anti-affirmative action position Hudson advocates. Without it the book is subject to
ridicule by those who would argue that today?s examples of colorblind voting are the
direct result of black incumbency produced by race-based redistricting. Consider for
example, a black man who recently won election to Congress by winning 4 out of 10 white
votes. One might interpret this victory as supporting Hudson?s argument against
race-based districting. But if one takes a wide-angle view of this man?s political
career, it could be hard not to see the link between his initial election to office in a
majority black district, where he was able to stockpile the benefits of incumbency, and
his current ability to sow the seeds of biracial politics in a white southern district.
At the end of the book Hudson draws three bold conclusions: The act lacked any measurable
goals, thus allowing it to run far from of its original intent. The act?s inclusion of
language minorities turned it from an equal opportunity act to a social reallocation
program. Rather than overcoming the long-term effects of race, the Act?s 1982 results
test maximized racial contention through inequitable voting schemes. 
While Along Racial Lines ultimately fails to deliver the kind of evidence needed to
support these contentions, it will serve as a useful resource for those desiring a
run-down of what happened, when and how in the long and continuing battle over the voting
rights of blacks, Native Americans and Hispanics. Hudson?s expansion of the discussion
beyond the black-white racial paradigm to include the complicating stories of Native
Americans and Hispanics is salutary. Moreover, his effort to disaggregate all three of
these minority labels in the specific contexts of the communities he examines is an
important reminder of the mitigating factors that can and do occur when politics hits the
ground. Overall I found that the work of the Hudson was clear for the most part. He did
well in providing other?s thoughts on this issue, although it is hard to determine
exactly what they were.