Book Review

History matters. That is the main message of J. Morgan Kousser, a history professor at California Institute of Technology, in this thoroughly researched and well-argued book. Such a conclusion is not surprising given his years of expert witness testimony in voting rights cases. He chooses four of those cases to demonstrate the importance of historical precedents in defending the 1965 Voting Rights Act and subsequent Congressional amendments to that act. The cases include disputes over Latino voting rights in Los Angeles County, California, and African American voting rights in the city of Memphis and the states of Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas.	1
Kousser's research, which includes demographic statistics and the policies and statements of political leaders over time, uncovers a systematic pattern of Latino exclusion in the drawing of district lines in Los Angeles County, a conclusion upheld in Garza v. Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors (1990). In Memphis, a white supremacist fortress, civic leaders in the two decades after World War II implemented a variety of electoral procedures designed to dilute or otherwise stifle African American political participation and office holding, including at-large elections, numbered posts, and run-off requirements. The intent of the framers of these measures became clear through their candid public statements about the primacy of race in their deliberations.	2
Similar verbal and historical evidence illuminating the racial intent of lawmakers emerged in Georgia's passage of a statewide majority-vote requirement in 1964. Supporters of the measure attempted to place a progressive gloss on the legislation, much like the disfranchisers of the 1890s contended that barring African Americans from the political process would cleanse the electoral system and pave the way for efficient government. Though the federal judge in Brooks v. Miller (1996) agreed with the argument that political leaders held racial motives in their support of the majority-vote law, he concluded that other, nonracial factors, such as good government, were more important, thereby ignoring the historical context around which the 1964 law was passed.	3
When the U.S. Supreme Court threw out North Carolina's barely majority-minority Twelfth Congressional District in Shaw v. Reno (1993) and revisited the case with new boundaries but a similar decision in Shaw v. Hunt (1996), Justice Sandra Day O'Connor fastened on the district's irregular shape and concluded that its shape and the fact that race seemed to be the "sole" motive for the boundary rendered the district unconstitutional. Kousser's evidence demonstrating that irregular shapes were commonplace in North Carolina districting, that incumbent protection played a significant role in drawing district boundaries, and that state lawmakers had a documented history of restricting the influence of African American voters, went unheeded by the Court majority.	4
Kousser marshaled similar evidence in Bush v. Vera (1996), a Texas case challenging the creation of three minority opportunity districts in Dallas and Houston. The U.S. Supreme Court seemed unimpressed by a history of vote dilution in Texas districting, fastening instead on the shapes of the districts and, in a confusing modification of Shaw, concluded that race "predominated" as a motive in designing the districts.	5
These and subsequent cases before the Rehnquist Court reversed thirty years of case law and Congressional intent on voting rights, according to Kousser. In effect, the U.S. Supreme Court jeopardized the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by openly ignoring historic patterns of discrimination within the electoral process, particularly with respect to vote dilution tactics. The Court also ignored other evidence of intent in redistricting, including protection of incumbents and creating common communities of interest. Instead, the Court imposed nearly impossible standards of proof on the crafting of majority-minority districts, seeming to state that whenever race is an important consideration, the resulting district is unconstitutional.	6
Kousser reserves his most withering comments for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor who spoke for the majority in the first Shaw case. Not only does she seem to hold majority-minority districts and Democrats to a higher standard of proof than whites and Republicans, but she lacks any sense of history and awareness of previous electoral practices, despite evidence presented to the contrary. For Kousser, Justice is not only blind, but dumb. The author concludes that O'Connor's motives, as a former Republican Arizona state senator majority leader, are strictly partisan, not the first time an observer has charged the Court with a political taint. Especially irksome to Kousser are her and her colleagues' (both on the Court and in academia) emphasis on "color-blindness," when in fact the framers of both the Fourteenth Amendment and the Voting Rights Act intended those measures to be very color conscious, particularly in the protection of African American voting rights.	7
The severe narrowing of the Voting Rights Act by the Rehnquist court and the politicization of the federal judiciary do not augur well for the next round of redistricting that will follow the 2000 census, Kousser fears. The Rehnquist Court has offered state legislatures very few guidelines and numerous contradictions; most important, the Court has relegated history to a footnote, or worse, distorted the historical record to favor whites and Republicans. Kousser laments that, much as the federal judiciary undermined the numerous Reconstruction acts from the 1870s onward, the Rehnquist Court has initiated a Second Redemption with its interpretation of the Voting Rights Act.	8
Still, there is a glimmer of hope, though at the time Kousser completed the book, it was not apparent. On the forty-fifth anniversary of the historic Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision, the Supreme Court overturned a lower court ruling that declared the latest version of North Carolina's troubled Twelfth Congressional District an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for a unanimous court, ruled that the lower court must take into account other evidence of intent, including the state's desire to create a Democratic district, even if many of those Democrats happened to be African Americans. The ruling may permit state lawmakers to concentrate predictable Democratic and Republican voters in separate districts while ensuring continued black representation from certain areas.	9
And though the two districts in Georgia and the Twelfth Congressional District in North Carolina are no longer majority-minority enclaves, there is some encouragement in the fact that incumbent African Americans won reelection in 1998. True, these victories may reflect more the power of incumbency and the Democratic bent of the districts to begin with, but racial polarization in voting may become less significant over time.	10
Some readers might find Kousser's blow-by-blow descriptions of the case studies a bit tedious, but they are excellent primers on voting rights defenses, particularly the gathering, analysis, and presentation of historical evidence. Beyond the case studies, the chapters dealing with the aftermath of Shaw v. Reno are especially helpful in placing the recent voting rights cases in historical context. Though Kousser overstates the case for institutions as molders of race relations in this country—his own evidence suggests that institutional decisions often reflect cultural norms and attitudes—the impacts of the judiciary and the Congress are indeed understated by legal scholars. Among its many strengths, the book both updates and synthesizes the edited work of Chandler Davidson and Bernard Grofman (Quiet Revolution in the South: The Impact of the Voting Rights Act, 1965-1990 [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994]), while it also adds considerably to our theoretical and historical understanding of voting rights. This is a book that is valuable for attorneys, judges, policymakers, and academics in helping to understand the nation's tortuous path toward racial justice.	11
David Goldfield University of North Carolina, Charlotte

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