The Right to Vote: Protection or Suppression Since 1965

Less than a week before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the Gilder Lehrman Center hosted a panel discussion titled “The Right to Vote: Protection or Suppression Since 1965.” The goal was to explore tensions between efforts to abridge and efforts to ensure the electoral franchise, focusing on the period between the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the present. To place current trends in voting suppression in historical context, patterns dating to the aftermath of the Civil War and the Reconstruction also were addressed.

Moderator:
David W. Blight, Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director, the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery and Abolition, Yale University
Presenters:
Ari Berman, Political correspondent for The Nation magazine; investigative journalism fellow at the Nation Institute; and author of Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America
Beverly Gage, Professor of History, Yale University
Isela Gutiérrez-Gunter, Associate Research Director, Democracy North Carolina
Kenneth Mack, Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law and Affiliate Professor of History at Harvard University and author of Representing the Race: The Creation of a Civil Rights Lawyer