Civil rights leader and former U.S. attorney general Holder, with coauthor Koppelman (coauthor of Impeach: The Case against Donald Trump), examines historic and current challenges to voting rights in the U.S... Based on his direct experiences as the first Black U.S. attorney general, working under the first Black U.S. president, Holder describes the ongoing threats against U.S. democracy and, responding to policy changes leading to voter suppression, argues for new protective measures and processes to safeguard and expand voting rights for millions of Americans...Readers will find important, compelling episodes in U.S. history and politics, along with hope for the future in the form of the opportunities Holder outlines for challenging voter suppression and other threats to our democracy.
In this analytical call-to-action, former U.S. attorney general Holder charts the history of voter discrimination...Noting that since the Supreme Court 'gutted' the Voting Rights Act in 2013, more than two dozen states 'have instituted draconian anti-voting laws that clearly and intentionally have a disproportionate impact on communities of color,' Holder documents disagreements among the Founders over whether to 'expand the franchise' to propertyless whites, and details the progress and reversal of Black voting rights after the Civil War and the campaign for women's suffrage...His proposals for fixing the problem include automatic voter registration and passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act...Lucid history lessons and concrete solutions make this an essential primer on a hot-button political issue.
Holder writes critically, but he also offers a positive program for change that insists that only by popular actions, such as voter drives and demands for electoral fairness on the part of elected officials, will that change come...It can be done, he adds; part of the work is over the long haul, exemplified by the decades it took women to earn the right to vote, to say nothing of Black and Native American constituencies...Another part is the kind of direct action that recently forced the Texas legislature to withdraw the most retrograde provisions of a packet of voter-suppression measures...A powerful defense of democracy coupled with a thoughtful survey of the struggle for civil rights.
