ABSTRACT
The contemporary variant of African-American politics has evolved from successive breakthroughs that were the political legacies of the Civil Rights Movement. The Civil Rights Movement mobilized Black America at the mass level, and helped to galvanize a loosely organized but sizeable biracial coalition that subsequently supported an impressive array of political breakthroughs. The Voting Rights Act was the premier policy victory to emerge from the successes of the Civil Rights Movement in terms of helping to shape and institutionalize a sizeable black political class. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 had a significantly transformative effect in that it led to an enormous expansion in the number of black elected officials nationwide, an expansion that has spanned some four decades. The black population in the South has always tended to be more spatially dispersed than in northern states. This has resulted in a heightened underrepresentation of the southern black population.
