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BRNOVICH v. DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE 

KAGAN, J., dissenting 

some  600  protesters,  led  by  future  Congressman  John 
Lewis,  sought  to  cross  the  Edmund  Pettus  Bridge.    State 
troopers  in  riot  gear  responded  brutally:  “Turning  their 
nightsticks horizontally, they rushed into the crowd, knock-
ing people over like bowling pins.”  G. May, Bending Toward 
Justice 87 (2013).  Then came men on horseback, “swinging 
their clubs and ropes like cowboys driving cattle to market.”  
Ibid.    The  protestors  were  beaten,  knocked  unconscious, 
and bloodied.  Lewis’s skull was fractured.  “I thought I was 
going to die on this bridge,” he later recalled.  Rojas, Selma 
Helped  Define  John  Lewis’s  Life,  N. Y.  Times,  July  28, 
2020. 
  A  galvanized  country  responded.    Ten  days  after  the 
Selma march, President Johnson wrote to Congress propos-
ing legislation to “help rid the Nation of racial discrimina-
tion in every aspect of the electoral process and thereby in-
sure the right of all to vote.”  H. R. Doc. No. 120, at 1.  (To 
his  attorney  general,  Johnson was still  more emphatic: “I 
want you to write the goddamnedest toughest voting rights 
act that you can devise.”  H. Raines, My Soul Is Rested 337 
(1983).)    And  in  August  1965,  after  the  bill’s  supporters 
overcame  a  Senate  filibuster,  Johnson  signed  the  Voting 
Rights Act into law.  Echoing Grant’s description of the Fif-
teenth Amendment, Johnson called the statute “one of the 
most  monumental  laws  in  the  entire  history  of  American 
freedom.”  Public Papers of the Presidents, Lyndon B. John-
son, Vol. 2, Aug. 6, 1965, p. 841 (1966) (Johnson Papers). 
  “After a century’s failure to fulfill the promise” of the Fif-
teenth Amendment, “passage of the VRA finally led to sig-
nal improvement.”  Shelby County, 570 U. S., at 562 (Gins-
burg,  J.,  dissenting).    In  the  five  years  after  the  statute’s 
passage,  almost  as many  African  Americans registered to 
vote in six Southern States as in the entire century before 
1965.   See Davidson,  The  Voting  Rights  Act: A  Brief His-
tory, in Controversies in Minority Voting 21 (B. Grofman &