Sherrilyn Ifill
speaker
219 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 5 May
Sherrilyn Ifill’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 May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And that culminated in that march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the brutality of Alabama state troopers, and then months later, the signing of the Voting Rights Act.
And the Voting Rights Act of 1965 completely changed the game.
When that act was finally passed by Congress, there were only 72 black elected officials in the entire United States.
in the entire United States.
No, no, no.
That's it.
Anywhere.
72.
In the whole country.
There you go.
And then, of course, it started to do its work.
And so by 1980, right before the Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act, we were up to about 1,500
And then Congress amended the Voting Rights Act in 1982 to change the test used for establishing discrimination under Section 2.
Sure, sure, sure.
So we had thought that the test was that if you showed that a particular practice used by a state resulted in black people not being able to elect their candidates of choice, it violated the Voting Rights Act.
Then the Supreme Court in 1980, in a decision called Mobile v. Bolden, said, no, no, no.
No, no, no, the test has to be that you have to show that the jurisdiction was intentionally racist.
Like, intended, yes.
They never did that.
Well, there were a few cases where there were some interesting hearings that took place in state houses where they said some things, but that certainly was not the norm by 1980.
Showing 41–60 of 219 · page 3 of 11
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