In Hudson's ambitious study he identifies two major temporal consequences of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA).

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In Hudson’s ambitious study he identifies two major temporal consequences of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA):. First, the VRA was part of President Johnson’s Great Society initiative.  This was to increase the democratic participation of blacks by ensuring them equal access to voting booths in Southern states. Second, the  racist intimidation in the form a literacy tests, constitutional interpretation tests and other obstacles imposed by whites.  These factors prevented blacks from registering to vote in many Southern states.  Reinforcement of the 15th amendment was, in Hudson’s view, accomplished within the first five years of the VRA.  As black registration in the South increased from 29% in 1965 to 56% in 1970. What followed on the heels of this victory, however, was nothing short of the accelerated unraveling of Martin Luther King’s dream of racial assimilation.  Today we live the nightmare of a society hemmed "along racial lines. Who is to blame? To a large extent, Hudson’s offenders are civil rights leaders who have stretched the original intent of the VRA to encompass "affirmative action" measures such as race-based redistricting and bilingual ballots. Consequently, race-based segregation hardened and racial "sensitivities" grow in an atmosphere of "political correctness." The civil rights leaders drove Congress to extend the VRA’s life and amend its scope every few years. These were aided by federal courts who interpreted the act and its constitutional underpinnings in the broadest manner. The Voting Rights Act evolved into an affirmative action program that contradicted the dream of assimilation.  In addition to providing a thorough and thus extremely informative account of the legislative history.  The political debates and the role played by federal courts in shaping the 1965 VRA and its subsequent amendments and extensions, Hudson engages in a comparative study of how these developments played out in three particular communities. He chooses Dallas, Texas to represent "the struggle for blacks for representation in city government," Dade County, Florida to depict "the assumption of power by Hispanic immigrants," and the Navajo Reservation in Arizona to show "changes in the political influence of the largest tribe of Native Americans."

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 The first two chapters give a clear and concise primer on the nuts and bolts of U.S. elections.  The chapter provides key terms and other tools to understand the voting process.  Other chapters begin with the political and legislative history of successive steps in what Hudson calls the "voting-rights journey" and goes on to supplement those histories with stories from Dallas, Arizona and Dade County. These stories from the "field" put human faces on the larger narrative. In early chapters, Hudson weaves these two techniques together brilliantly, infusing the events leading up to the passage of the VRA with the ...

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