Link: When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law
in 1965, it was an antidote to Jim Crow-era efforts to suppress the
black vote in Southern states still fighting bloody battles over racial
equality.

Forty-six years later, the law has become a partisan arguing point in
several Dixie statehouses between Democrats and Republicans bent on
justifying opposing strategies to increase their respective advantages
in this year’s redistricting debates.