Rachel Cobb reviews Gary May’s Bending Toward Justice at The New Rambler:

Bending Toward Justice is a terrific addition to the literature on the history of the Voting Rights Act. It offers an engrossing narrative of the drama leading up to the Act and a careful depiction of the vulnerabilities, flaws, and challenges faced by many of the key characters. Here the reader comes to know King’s self-doubt, Johnson’s orders to have the FBI wiretap King, J. Edgar Hoover’s attempts to undermine King, the raw racism, hatred, and anger of Sherrif Clark, and the worries, fears, and heroism of the civil rights activists. The book is not, as it promises, a full treatment of the “transformation of American Democracy” since the Voting Rights Act. More books are needed to help explain and elucidate the polarized politics that marks today’s voting wars, and the challenges ahead posed by a fragmented set of policies that vary so widely by state. But Gary May’s book is a lucid and vibrant account of the struggle to achieve this critically important piece of legislation and of the battles that ensued after its passage.