Peniel Joseph is the Barbara Jordan chair in ethics and political values and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor of history. He is the author of several books, most recently"The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr." The views expressed here are his. View more opinion articles on CNN.
A number of voters in Texas, many of them black and brown, waited in huge lines to vote in the Lone Star State's Democratic primary on Super Tuesday, reminding the nation of the high cost of the Supreme Court's 2013 Shelby v. Holder decision to repeal voting rights enforcement. Peniel JosephThe high court's decision to end the pre-clearance requirement that mandated that states under the jurisdiction of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 submit plans to alter voter access to the Justice Department has produced utter chaos, especially in communities dominated by people of color.