The Fight to Vote

He's got a couple of great books, The Fight to Vote and The Second Amendment, A Biography.

He's also the author of a number of previous books, including The Fight to Vote, which is a history of the struggle for voting rights

There was a backlash to Baker versus Carr and Reynolds v. Sims. Everett Dirksen, who was properly lauded as the Republican leader in the U.S. Senate for his role in passing the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act led a national effort to get a constitutional convention to overturn the one person who enfold cases.

the day before the 1913 presidential inaugural Woodrow Wilson arrived at Union Station in Washington expecting to be greeted by a big crowd and he got off the train and there was basically nobody there there was the Princeton Glee Club that was it and they had something that was you know and the New York Times reported that they made up in enthusiasm what they lacked in numbers you know they were they were in the tank for Wilson but finally Wilson's aide said to the host where are all the people and they said oh they're down at Pennsylvania Avenue watching the suffrage parade

on Pennsylvania Avenue it was the first great protest march in the country's history in Washington D.C. it was 5,000 women marching down Pennsylvania Avenue for the 19th amendment for the right to vote and they were led by a young woman on a white horse carrying a banner dressed as a Greek goddess and her name was Inez Mulholland and she's one of the amazing figures in American history that people don't know about she was a recent graduate of NYU School of Law where you teach and where the Brennan Center is affiliated

5,000 women behind her and on either side 100,000 men most of them drunk they were there for the inaugural and the the men started spitting and throwing things and broke through the police lines and beat up the women a hundred women went to the hospital it was a huge deal Inez Mulholland had to fight her way through the crowd with her horse and it was a big deal the police chief of Washington D.C. had to resign

the publicity for this overshadowed the presidential inaugural in many ways and immediately public opinion began to swing toward support for women's suffrage seeing these marchers attacked violently attacked for peacefully demanding their rights and you know it sounds just like Selma and you realize that this was years before Selma and it was years before so many of these tactics were so common and it still took several years but they won the right to vote

when the 19th amendment passed if you think about it it doubled the size of the electorate in terms of a constitutional guarantee and so you know we've we've had to wage this fight over and over again