One stark lesson from the Meredith era was how successful local officials could be in thwarting both the letter and the spirit of the law. Voting laws have evolved between now and then. The fight isn't so much about the right to vote but about the ability to exercise that right. And that has meant new tactics from those who continue to seek ways to suppress the votes of the nation's minorities (racial, economic, and otherwise). It's a national fight. And it may determine the outcome of the coming election. The fact is, the right to vote is nowhere near as well-guaranteed as you may have thought it was.

2012

Fifty years after the Battle of Mississippi, we endure the scorching summer of 2012. Today, the great civil rights story is the intensifying battle over how fast (or how slowly) Republican lawmakers and bureaucrats can take away from their fellow citizens the effective right to vote. In Ohio and Texas and other states, it's about restrictions on early voting. In Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and other states, it's about voter identification laws, which could disenfranchise millions of registered voters this election cycle.

Sponsored by the American Legislative Executive Council and choreographed by local GOP officials, these measures all have roughly the same aim: making it harder, and not just less convenient, for certain types of registered voters to be able to effectively vote. One party, in other words, is systematically enacting and enforcing legislation designed to suppress the votes of those citizens who are most likely to vote against that party. If this were happening in Russia, we'd be aghast -- and hectoring that country insufferably.

Proponents of the state measures say they are designed to ensure voter accuracy and to preclude voter fraud. But incidents of in-person voter fraud in America are laughably few. In Pennsylvania last week, a state court judge elected as a Republican wrote that it is irrelevant, as a matter of law, that the state offered no factual bases for restricting voter access. The justification the state did offer? That the mere possibility of voter fraud was enough to justify blocking registered voters from their ballots.

During the the Civil Rights era, most Americans had nothing but scorn for southern officials who ginned up such empty rationales to deprive black people of their voting rights. Does the fact that today's measures are aimed at poor white people, too, and the elderly, and recent immigrants, make them any less odious? Earlier this year, Florida came for the ballot of a man who had fought in the Battle of the Bulge. Tennessee came for the ballot of a 96-year-old woman. Those are the stories we know about.

And yet, so far, the new civil rights war is a powerful story still without consistent protest or condemnation from America's political, spiritual or civic leaders. President Barack Obama, the former law professor, said nothing last week about the Pennsylvania voting law that is discriminatory in both its intent and its effect. Neither did Attorney General Eric Holder. No member of Congress rushed back from vacation to Washington to decry the news. On television, it was Jon Stewart who most aptly memorialized the ruling:

A TIME AGAIN FOR JUDGES