Civil-rights gains were rolled back only fifteen years after the Voting Rights Act

Evidence

None of this happens overnight. It takes time and increasing vigilance to protect and secure change. I was talking with a close friend and he mentioned a basic fact: that we were only fifteen years removed from the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 when Ronald Reagan was elected president and Republicans began to dismantle the gains of the black freedom struggle. Civil rights legislation and the policies of the Great Society had just started to reshape our interactions when they started to be rolled back. … Democrats eventually buckled, and this is the view of government, no matter who is in office, that we have today. It has become a kind of touchstone of faith among most Americans that government is wasteful and should be limited in its role—that it shouldn’t intrude on our lives. Politicians aren’t the only ones who hold this view. Many Americans do, too. Now we can’t even imagine serious talk of things like full employment or the abolition of prisons. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 510

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s goal of judging how the post-Obama, post-Ferguson climate has constrained what racial equality proposals remain imaginable.