The best books on the history of voting rights in the United States

The best word for this book is “magisterial.” By detailing the entire history of U.S. voting rights from the late eighteenth century to the early twenty-first, Keyssar covers both the expansion and contraction of democratic political rights for different groups of Americans over time. In this way, he challenges popular and earlier scholarly assumptions that progress toward inclusive voting rights was easy, inevitable, and assured and that antidemocratic exclusions from the franchise—based on class, race, ethnicity, gender, or age—were the exception. 

Keyssar taught me how the U.S. Constitution divides power between the federal and state governments with regard to determining election regulations and voting qualifications, with the states predominant. As a consequence, constitutional amendments and federal oversight would be necessary to advance universal suffrage for all citizens. Laying out the broad themes in this long history, Keyssar’s book shows American democracy to be both fundamental and fragile.  

This book, published first in 1965 and then revised and reissued, was required reading when I was in graduate school. With this intellectual history of women’s suffrage, Kraditor sparked my interest in how ideas spur and shape political and social movements. Arguments, tactics, and strategies originate in the ideas of participants, and these ideas have consequences for how and what is eventually achieved. My favorite chapter explained the two kinds of arguments suffragists used. The argument from “justice” asserted women’s equal humanity with men, while the argument from “expediency” affirmed the benefits of extending women’s domestic caretaking into politics. 

My takeaway was that movements need multiple arguments to convince different constituencies to join and support their cause. Kraditor refused to whitewash the women’s suffrage movement and recounted how white, middle-class, native-born women also used ethnocentric and racist arguments to claim access to the ballot. 

This recent book tells the dramatic story of Tennessee’s ratification of the 19th Amendment. Thirty-six states were required for ratification, and by July 1920 it all came down to Tennessee. The fate of women’s suffrage, decades of struggle, hung in the balance. I love how Weiss brings the context, characters, and events in the drama to life. She vividly portrays the public proceedings and plotting behind-the-scenes for a victory that almost didn’t happen and can’t be taken for granted. Yet, in terms of race, it was a hollow victory. Weiss shows how the suffrage debate in Tennessee, a former slave state, inextricably interrelated with Black voting rights. 

As antisuffragists played the race card—women’s suffrage endangered racial disenfranchisement—white suffragists responded with their own version: white women outnumbered and could outvote African Americans, plus racial disenfranchisement would remain. Betrayed by the “suffrage sisterhood,” Black suffragists fought on.

Painting a broad picture of African-American women’s political advocacy and activism, Martha S. Jones presents women fighting for a voice in our political system from the early days of the Republic through women’s suffrage to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Many of the women and their contributions to racial and gender equality were familiar to me. Others less so, including three generations of Jones’s own foremothers who worked for democratic participation in their day. Bringing home how very personal the political is, Jones finds Black women’s politics in parties, elections, government, and beyond. In churches and community institutions, in careers as teachers and journalists, they pursued an expansive vision of human rights and dignity.

It’s an informative, inspiring history, with hard-won gains contextualized with hard truths about our impaired democracy, and reminded me that the obligation to repair it belongs to us all.

Ari Berman picks up the voting rights story in 1965, with the Voting Rights Act’s transformative impact on Black electoral participation and office-holding, especially in the South. Designed to enforce the 15th Amendment, the Voting Rights Act removed barriers to voter registration, like literacy tests, and required states and localities with histories of racial disenfranchisement to seek “preclearance” for changes to their voting and election laws. These and other measures succeeded in greatly expanding American democracy. 

Yet, as Berman documents, opposing forces sought to return to the states the power to restrict access to the ballot, and their own success came with Shelby v. Holder (2013), which ended preclearance. A raft of restrictive regulations immediately rolled out and have intensified today. In this book, since, and joined now by many others, Berman warns that American democracy is at great risk, a warning I deeply feel we need to heed.