Whose Votes Count?: Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights (Twentieth Century Fund Books/Reports/Studies)

Manhattan Institute scholar Abigail Thernstrom offers the best book available on minority voting rights and racial gerrymandering. Her study begins in the Jim Crow South, where blacks were routinely denied the right to vote through a sinister combination of racist intimidation and the unfair application of literacy tests. Thernstrom describes not only the urgent need for the 1965 Voting Rights Act to correct this problem, but also how amendments in the 1970s and '80s perverted this law's original purpose and turned the Voting Rights Act into a tool for race-conscious patronage politics. Although the book does not take account of the Supreme Court's most recent decisions on this subject (for an update, see chapter 16 of Thernstrom's excellent America in Black and White), it remains far and away the best on the topic.