Taylor Branch on Voting Rights

Historian and author Taylor Branch came to Lehigh in September, delivering a talk at Baker Hall on Voting Rights: A Civil Rights Challenge Yesterday and Today. Branch led his audience through a history of the civil rights movement, much of it viewed through his perspective as a white child growing up in a segregated South.

Despite the progress made by Martin Luther King and other activists on voting rights, threats to democracy have re-emerged in restrictive voter ID laws, gerrymandering of congressional districts and localized decisions on both the number and locations of polling places, he said.

The changes are driven, he said, “by a ridiculous standard of too many people voting rather than enough people voting.”

A more in-depth version of this story appeared on the Lehigh News Center.