How Endangered is the Right to Vote? A Conversation on the Past and Future of Voting Rights in the United States with Franita Tolson

03/15/21 • 50 min

2 Listeners

Months after the national election and despite numerous judicial decisions to the contrary, many Americans still believe the election was stolen from Donald Trump. In recent weeks various state legislatures have used the claim of voter fraud to propose new bills to change voting procedures, launching a new chapter in the long battle over the franchise in the United States. In this episode of "Then & Now," we discuss the history of voter suppression and the current state of play with election law expert, Professor Franita Tolson, Vice Dean for Academic Affairs at the USC Gould School of Law and author of the forthcoming book In Congress We Trust: Enforcing Voting Rights From the Founding Fathers to the Jim Crow Era.

Previous Episode

Is the University an Agent of Change? A Conversation with Historian Eddie Cole

Higher education institutions in the United States can be seen as both bastions of liberalism and conservatism, as the realm of both radicals and establishmentarians. Eddie Cole, associate professor of higher education and organizational change at UCLA and author of The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom addresses this seeming contradiction. He discusses the dual nature of the university, as well as the role played by college presidents in moving their institutions forward and backward on issues such as race and free speech. The conversation concludes with a reflection on the recently concluded Black History Month and the importance of history.

Next Episode

The Long History of Anti-Asian Hatred: A Conversation with Karen Umemoto and David Yoo

Anti-Asian sentiment and violence has spiked dramatically over the last year. Most recently on March 16, a mass shooting in Atlanta, Georgia took the lives of eight people, six of whom were Asian women. UCLA Professors David Yoo and Karen Umemoto join this special episode of Then & Now to discuss this disturbing trend and situate it in the context of race and racism in American society. They discuss policies that have stigmatized and excluded Asian Americans, the development of the “AAPI” category, different forms of resistance against exclusion, and today's increasing mobilization and solidarity against anti-Asian hatred.

To learn more about how to combat Asian American hatred, please visit UCLA’s Translate COVID site here.