How the landmark legislation continues to reverberate to this day
Coverage of the Supreme Court’s decision last week to undo Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — a ruling that will make it more difficult to create “majority-minority” voting districts — has focused on its effects on minority representation in the South. Specifically, commentators have shone a spotlight on how the Act has uprooted deeply racist voting practices in places like Louisiana, where the current challenge had been playing out.
Even New Yorkers deeply disturbed by the ruling likely comforted themselves in part with the thought that they at least live in a state where the just and heavy hand of the federal government was not needed to keep racist voting rules at bay. That self-assurance was no doubt reinforced if they were lucky enough to have seen Bryan Cranston’s Tony Award-winning portrayal of Lyndon Johnson’s megalomaniac machinations to pass the bill, which focused almost entirely on uprooting anti-Black voter suppression in the former Confederacy.
That view of this crucial federal legislation is far too narrow. Indeed, virtually every core element of New York City’s current governmental structure has been shaped by New York City itself being subject to that very same Voting Rights Act. Not in 1965 or in 1969, but in the late 1980s.
I should know. Because as a junior, just-out-of-college staffer to the 1988 and 1989 New York City Charter Revision Commissions led first by Richard Ravitch and then Frederick A. O. Schwarz, it was my responsibility to compile, photocopy and collate our submission to the Justice Department for pre-clearance under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. All 20,000 pages of it.
Because of its past history of discriminatory voting practices in Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx (specifically, English literacy tests in the 1968 and 1972 presidential elections, combined with low turnout), New York City needed federal approval, or “preclearance,” before changing any voting laws in any of those “covered” counties. And thanks to a unanimous 9-0 Supreme Court ruling on March 22, 1989, in Board of Estimate v. Morris, New York City’s voting laws needed to change, big time. The problem was that the city’s distinctive and all-powerful quasi-legislative body, the Board of Estimate, which made virtually every major decision and approved every City contract and land use action, violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, specifically the principle of one-person, one-vote.
Created when the five boroughs consolidated as a single city in 1898, the Board was a clever compromise. Along with citywide elected officials, each borough president had one vote. But as the plaintiff’s lawyer Richard Emery noted, there was a problem, one that New York’s political establishment chose to ignore for almost a century: It wildly distorted an individual voter’s power. Staten Island’s borough president, who represented 350,000 people, had the same voting power as Brooklyn’s borough president, who represented 2.2 million people. Ditto for voter dilution in Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx.
While the Voting Rights Act was not central to the Supreme Court decision, it became an essential lens through which any new form of government and decision-making would be viewed. It was not lost on people that Staten Island’s population was far less diverse than the more populous boroughs, adding another layer of inequity to be remedied beyond the mathematically simple issue of one-person, one-vote.
A central issue was what to do with the City Council, an entity so lacking in gravitas and power that onetime at-large Councilman Henry Stern said that it was “less than a rubber stamp because a rubber stamp at least leaves an impression.”
The first step in that Charter revision was to give it more power, including many of the legislative and land-use powers the Board of Estimate had held. And since some of the other Board powers, such as the approval of contracts, were more logically shifted to the executive branch, the traditional legislative oversight powers seen at the national and state level needed to be enhanced as well.
Hand in hand with the question of how to empower the Council in a manner consistent with federal antidiscrimination law was the question of how diverse it would be. The existing Council consisted of 25 equally populated districts and 10 at-large borough seats, two representing each of the five boroughs. It quickly became clear that simply eliminating the at-large seats was not enough and that the overall number of council districts needed to significantly increase. Staff conducted detailed research (to which I was lucky enough to contribute) and after considerable deliberation, the Commission decided to increase the number of Council seats to 51, holding populations constant across the districts. While many voices feared strengthening a body with a lackluster record and reputation, others recognized that a reconstituted body had the power to significantly alter the racial balance of power in the city. A significant coalition of groups representing minority interests, led by then-Bronx Borough President Freddy Ferrer, feared that the provisions would result in an “imperial mayor.” Ferrer called the proposed revisions a “gross infringement of the Voting Rights Act” and vowed to challenge them at the Justice Department.
As a junior staffer I knew that my writing and thinking had a minimal impact on the Commission’s work. Arguably it was my physical work — my brawn rather than my brain — that mattered more and which also signalled how very seriously the Commission and its staff took the Voting Rights preclearance process. Across multiple volumes and more than 20,000 pages, I had to help catalogue, collate, index and copy every single transcript, piece of testimony, research memo, legal brief, sign-in sheet, legislative history and angry letter from disrespected machine pols to Staten Island secessionists.
At the end of the day, the Justice Department reviewed what the New York Times called “a small truckload of documents” and found that the proposed charter revisions passed legal muster, at least through the lens of the Voting Rights Act. Interestingly, because of the compressed time frame after the Supreme Court decision in the spring of an election year, that approval didn’t come until after the voters had had their say, approving the charter changes in November 1989 by approximately 55% to 45%. While those approvals resulted in the most significant changes in New York City’s governance in 90 years, what far more New Yorkers recall about that historic election was the mayor’s race: David Dinkins defeated Rudy Giuliani by a much slimmer margin to become the city’s first black mayor. In a single day, through the mayoral election and the Charter referendum, the racial balance of power in New York City changed dramatically. Four years later, David Dinkins lost to Rudy Giuliani, but the newly empowered and more racially diverse Council was here to stay, thanks to the Voting Rights Act.
