The first case I argued in the supreme court was in 1982. I represented African American voters from Burke county, Georgia, where no Black person had ever been elected to office even though 40% of the voters were Black. The reason was simple. All candidates were elected at large by the voters of the entire county, and the white majority could outvote Black voters every time.

Federal law banned many older methods of southern discrimination–the bogus literacy tests, “understanding” tests, and poll taxes, for example – but structural barriers like the one in Burke county were pervasive, and they suppressed Black politics across the south. In Georgia, fewer than one percent of the elected officials in the state were African Americans while more than a quarter of the state’s registered voters were Black.

I won the Burke county case in the trial court and court of appeals, but it was a different matter in the supreme court because it had just announced a new rule – contrary to two centuries of precedents – that election discrimination was legal unless the plaintiffs proved that the very purpose of the law was to discriminate.

While my case was pending in the supreme court, I was part of an effort to amend the Voting Rights Act to supersede the supreme court’s intentional discrimination ruling since that decision, left standing, would in effect end minority political progress in the south. I testified before both the House and Senate committees in support of legislation to prohibit election practices that “resulted in” discrimination regardless of their purpose.

One of the most rabid opponents of amending the Voting Rights Act was a young lawyer in the Reagan justice department, John Roberts. He lobbied members of Congress, wrote position papers, and drafted testimony deriding the amendment. He failed in that effort, and the legislation ultimately passed. I also squeezed just enough evidence of intentional discrimination out of the record to convince a majority of the justices to rule for my clients.

That same John Roberts........

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