By The Editors

Perhaps it is just a matter of Congressional scheduling.

But the more historically-minded are sure to believe it no mere coincidence. For today, the very day the U.S. Senate votes on the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor as the next Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, also marks the 44th anniversary of the signing of the Voting Rights Act.

There is a direct line of descent from the moment on August 6, 1965, when President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the document to this moment.

There is a direct line of descent from what the Act made possible in the late 1960s to the fact that a Latina American, with seventeen years experience as a Federal judge, is about to assume a seat on the Supreme Court—having been nominated by the nation’s first African-American President.

It is a line of descent that began long before the 1960s and demanded the courage and sacrifice of many thousands of black Americans and their white allies. In fact, black voters were registering the vote in significant numbers across the country, even in the fiercely-racist South, in the 1940s and 1950s as the nascent civil rights movement gained intensity.