Commission work latest for Rice sociologist

Commission work latest for Rice sociologist’s fight for voter rights

BY B.J. ALMOND
Rice News staff

When the National Commission on the Voting Rights Act held a hearing in Montgomery, Ala., earlier this month, seated among the seven commission members was Rice’s Chandler Davidson, the Radoslav A. Tsanoff Professor Emeritus of Public Affairs and Sociology.

Chandler Davidson

For eight hours he listened to testimony from lawyers and academicians specializing in voting rights, elected officials and everyday citizens who just wanted to share their experiences with discrimination against minority voters in the South.

Davidson will be the primary drafter of a report summarizing information that the commission obtains through a series of four to six regional hearings around the nation.

The hearings are being held to gather testimony and other evidence that will be used to create a comprehensive record of racial discrimination in voting since 1982 — the last time the temporary features of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) were reauthorized.

Congress enacted the VRA of 1965 to protect the right to vote among minorities, and it relies on an extensive record of discrimination in voting to justify the need for remedies imposed by provisions of the act that will be expiring.

Provisions of the VRA set to expire in 2007 include a requirement that jurisdictions in all or part of 16 selected states submit voting changes to the Justice Department or a federal court for approval before they can be implemented; a requirement that more than 450 counties and townships provide language assistance to voters with limited proficiency in the English language; and authorization of the Department of Justice to appoint an examiner or send observers to any jurisdiction in the 16 states singled out by the VRA to protect people of color.

Davidson has more than just a passing familiarity with the ins and outs of the VRA. He testified before Congress for the 1982 reauthorization of the act, and he co-edited a seminal book on voting rights, “Quiet Revolution in the South: The Impact of the Voting Rights Act, 1965-1990.”

His career-long interest in racial politics and minority voting spans more than four decades. “I got caught up in the civil rights movement as a student at The University of Texas–Austin in the early ’60s,” Davidson said. He fondly remembers participating in “stand ins” before the Civil Rights Act was passed. At that time, movie theaters in Austin would not sell tickets to blacks, so Davidson and others would form a line outside the box office and take turns buying tickets and then trying to purchase another ticket for a black friend. When the theater refused to sell the additional ticket, the protestors would request a refund for the ticket they had already bought. These repeated transactions slowed business for the theaters because other customers had to wait in line longer. Eventually the group picketed other businesses in the university neighborhood as well, which caused some of them to desegregate.

When Davidson joined the Rice faculty in 1966, he was working on a Ph.D. from Princeton and chose to study black politics and the rise of the civil rights movement in Houston for his doctoral thesis, which was published as a book. Back then, Houston’s city council consisted of eight members elected citywide. Davidson realized how difficult it was for blacks to get elected under this system, given the racial bloc voting by whites, and he testified as an expert witness in the case that resulted in the current council structure (nine single-member districts and five at-large members).

He has since testified in more than 30 voting-rights cases around the nation, and he said the National Commission on the Voting Rights Act, which was created by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, is still needed.

“There’s still a lot of racism in this country,” he said. “There are people who don’t want their representative to be black.”

Despite all the incidents of discrimination that he has read about over the years, Davidson was still surprised by some of the evidence of descrimination presented during the hearing in Montgomery.

For example, a New Orleans political scientist presented data showing that a high degree of racially politicized voting still exists throughout the South.

And in a referendum in Alabama last year, white voters overwhelmingly opposed removing from the state constitution some language requiring segregation — even though this language was rendered null and void by the Civil Rights Act back in the ’60s.

“Racism just dies hard,” Davidson said. But he noted that much progress has been made and pointed out that the number of black officials elected in Alabama is now proportional to the state’s population, thanks largely to the VRA. “No other state can claim that,” he said.

The March 11 hearing in Montgomery coincided with the 40th anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery Voting Rights March — a re-enactment of the 1965 event when thousands of people walked more than 50 miles to stand in front of Alabama’s capitol as civil rights leaders demanded that voter-registration barriers for minorities be abolished. Davidson and his wife joined the marchers in the last few miles of the march to commemorate the historic occasion.