Ari Berman
speaker
360 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 8 Jul
Ari Berman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Each reauthorization of the law was signed by a Republican president.
And what changed was the Supreme Court.
You had a Supreme Court, first with the appointments of Justices Roberts and Alito, and then with the three judges appointed by Trump, that turned its back on that bipartisan consensus and made it their mission to overturn the Voting Rights Act and to really overturn the second reconstruction of the 1960s and to roll back the most important accomplishments of the civil rights movement.
And the Voting Rights Act is only 60 years old.
It's not hard to find people whose relatives were murdered in the fight for voting rights.
It's not hard to find people in the South who had to face literacy tests and poll taxes.
their entire states were gerrymandered in favor of white candidates who supported white supremacy.
This is a relatively recent history in America.
And the fact that in the weeks after this decision, you already saw states scramble to eliminate black representation just shows you how our country is now moving backwards when it comes to race and voting in really alarming ways.
It's devastating for them.
I mean, I think about the times that I spent with Congressman John Lewis in Alabama, where we went back and we crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where he was brutally beaten in the infamous Bloody Sunday march.
And to think about someone like Congressman John Lewis, who devoted their entire life
to fighting for the right to vote and to see that rolled back.
It makes it feel like all of those struggles, all of the blood,
all of the horrors that it ultimately meant nothing.
I mean, that is really extraordinary.
I was at a function not too long after the decision, and I was with David Goodman.
And his brother, Andrew Goodman, went down to Mississippi in 1964 and was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan.
He is part of Goodman, Cheney, and Schwerner.
the three young civil rights workers who were murdered by the Klan, simply for trying to help Black people register to vote.
Showing 161–180 of 360 · page 9 of 18
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