DEMOCRACY IN PERIL: How the U.S. Supreme Court set the stage for Republican lawmakers to steal elections.

• Author: Graves, Lisa

For years, Fred Culp cast his vote for President without difficulty--until Republicans in North Carolina pushed through voter ID restrictions in 2013. Culp, who is Black, was born in South Carolina on the eve of World War II. He grew up during a time when Black people could enter white restaurants only through side doors and segregation was enforced by police. He made his home in Waxhaw, North Carolina, about 100 miles south of Greensboro, where young Black men and women held sit-ins at the Woolworths lunch counter. Waxhaw is in a county where, in 1961, the police blatantly orchestrated the violent beatings of Freedom Riders.

As a young man, Culp watched the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. rally people of conscience to make good on the Fourteenth Amendment's promise of "equal protection of the laws," through bills like the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

For decades, this act stopped states like North Carolina from changing their election laws or procedures without prior review by the Voting Rights Section of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. That changed on June 25, 2013, when the U.S. Supreme Court, dominated by Republican nominees, gutted the Voting Rights Act by removing the requirement of prior review.

This decision was handed down just six days after Juneteenth celebrations marked the anniversary of the official end of slavery in the United States. Even after the bloodiest war in U.S. history, it took another five years, until 1870, for Congress to enshrine the Fifteenth Amendment into the Constitution, giving the right to vote to Black men born in the United States--men like Culp.

For a brief period, Black men in the South not only voted but were elected to local, state, and Congressional offices, including Hiram Rhodes Revels, the nation's first Black US. Senator. The white supremacist sons and daughters of the Confederacy responded by concocting a web of laws that were "neutral" on their surface, but racist in their effect.

One example was imposing literacy tests as a prerequisite to registering to vote. In practice, that requirement was applied with caprice. And, bylaw, it exempted those whose grandfathers had voted when only white men were allowed to vote. That is the white supremacist origin of the phrases "grandfathered in" and the "grandfather clause."

In 1965, just a few years after Culp became old enough to vote, the Voting Rights Act limited the ability of Southern states to make changes to the electoral system unless they could prove a prospective change "neither has the purpose nor will have the effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race...