Every Expansion of Democracy Has Faced Backlash

Black political power has never grown without institutions and actors mobilizing to contain it. The SAVE Act is the latest chapter.

By Diamond Brown and Melody Dodoo

During his State of the Union address last month, the president declared “we ended DEI in America,” drawing loud applause from party loyalists. Later, he championed proposed barriers to the ballot as necessary to protect elections.

Intentional or not, the parallel declarations reflect something deeper than mere coincidence: In America, expansions of democracy have routinely triggered efforts to narrow it. Black political power has never grown without institutions and actors mobilizing to contain it.

Photo by Unseen Histories on Unsplash

The SAVE America Act (SAVE), which recently passed the House, and broader attacks on the right to vote fit squarely within that tradition. SAVE and other documentary proof-of-citizenship proposals are offered in the name of “election integrity” but are engineered as instruments of exclusion. Black Americans know, perhaps more intimately than any other group, that barriers to the ballot rarely present themselves plainly. This tired American story has repeated itself with exhausting predictability and the pattern is quite difficult to ignore. Periods of expanded Black political participation are often followed by new rules that reshape, restrict, and complicate access.

March 7 marks the 61st anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when peaceful protesters in Selma, Alabama, were met with brutal violence for insisting on their right to vote. The moment invites reflection on progress and pattern.

The Reconstruction Amendments — the 13th, 14th, and 15th — are among the most radical democratic achievements in American life. They abolished slavery, established citizenship, and enshrined the principle that race cannot determine access to political participation. For a fleeting but transformative period, they helped construct a multiracial democracy. But Black political empowerment has never been treated as a democratic triumph, only as a threat that needed to be contained.

The backlash was swift. Poll taxes, literacy tests, and “Grandfather clauses” were deployed to substantially reduce Black voter turnout and dismantle Black political influence. Jim Crow refined this architecture of exclusion. Black citizenship was not openly denied; instead, it was rendered prohibitively costly, burdensome, or dangerous to exercise. To further ostracize Black voters, states rewrote constitutions, manipulated district lines, and layered in barriers designed to weaken Black representation.

When legal and administrative hurdles were not sufficient, violence and intimidation did the rest. Bloody Sunday exposed the brutal reality Black people faced when seeking nothing more than the right to vote. The images forced a reckoning, and the result was the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, bipartisan landmark legislation that reinvigorated Black political representation. But, again, Black advancement invited resistance.

In the following decades, new restrictions emerged, buoyed by false narratives of rampant voter fraud, often racialized and without evidence. Then, the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v Holder weakened the Voting Rights Act by removing preclearance for states with a history of voter suppression. We’ve had multiple legal attacks on voting rights since 2013, SAVE is the latest strategy. It’s not a secret that such laws suppress eligible voter turnout.

To the contrary, documentary proof-of-citizenship requirements have a long and well-documented history of excluding eligible voters. Take Kansas for instance, which passed a proof-of-citizenship law similar to the SAVE Act. It blocked one in seven eligible Kansans from registering to vote. In fact, an estimated 21 million Americans do not have ready access to their citizenship documents. That number includes countless older Black voters born in the Jim Crow South whose births were never recorded because of the very system of segregation the Reconstruction amendments were designed to dismantle. For them, a requirement to produce a birth certificate is a 21st-century literacy test.

Ultimately, each era of history has adopted its own set of exclusionary tools used to weaponize, and each pursues the same objective: muting Black voices and constraining Black representation.

But history teaches us something else — something far more enduring. Black political participation has consistently expanded, strengthened, and revitalized American democracy. From Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement, from modern multiracial coalitions to record voter turnout, Black people have pushed this country closer to its greatest ability at every turn. The arc of this story is not defined by the barriers imposed but by the progress that outlasts them. Black voters have always been central to that progress and will remain so.

Diamond Brown is a senior policy counsel at Democracy Defenders Action. Melody Dodoo is a legal extern at Democracy Defenders Fund.

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