| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Free at Last to Vote: The Alabama Origins of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. By Brian K. Landsberg. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. xiv, 264 pp. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-7006-1510-0.)

Brian K. Landsberg's new study of the origins of the Voting Rights Act enriches our understanding of the profound changes wrought in the nation's civil rights policies in the 1960s. It combines a case study of three Alabama voting rights lawsuits brought by the Justice Department in the years preceding the 1965 Voting Rights Act—lesser-known cases in Sumter, Elmore, and Perry counties—with a detailed account of the crafting of the act itself. Innovative legal theories, methods of proof, and remedies developed in that litigation played a major role in shaping the bill, which was drafted by lawyers in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division and revised along lines suggested by Solicitor General Archibald Cox. Furthermore, the detailed evidence assembled by Congress in lengthy hearings on the bill—which persuaded the Supreme Court of the constitutionality of the act—drew heavily from the records of cases such as the ones in Landsberg's three illustrative studies.

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