In 1950, soon after the first black person ran unsuccessfully for city council, Waco changed its method of electing council members.

What had been a ward (single-member district) system became an at-large system — each seat voted on by the entire city. It virtually guaranteed that no black could serve.

It took more than 20 years for Waco, goaded by the League of Women Voters, to deal with this injustice and implement single-member districts.

But setting the table for such a challenge was the pen of Lyndon Johnson. In 1965 he signed the Voting Rights Act.

That law has done much to make it possible for one-time marginalized groups to be represented in local, state and national government. It continues to work as intended.

Three years ago Congress wisely stopped an effort to pull the plug on the Voting Rights Act. Now a surprisingly unified U.S. Supreme Court has voted, 8-1, to uphold it — specifically the provision requiring federal approval for any changes in election laws or redistricting decisions in nine southern states including Texas that systematically discriminated against minority voters.

The Voting Rights Act is the reason why we have diverse city councils and school boards through single-member districts, as opposed to at-large districts that would cement a racial majority’s power.

The act is why gerrymandering can’t be used to let a one-vote majority in a Legislature to make it appear as if minorities don’t exist when districts are drawn.

It is too bad that our society still needs policies that consider race in determining how districts are drawn, but it does. Some will say that the election of an African-American president is testimony to the obsolescence of the Voting Rights Act. Sorry, but it is self-evident, in so many venues across the South, that if left to the nature of a tyrannical majority, blacks and Hispanics too often would be disenfranchised without the Justice Department keeping an eye on states under the Voting Rights Act.

True, some of the practices enabled by the Voting Rights Act can be seen as reverse discrimination, with safe districts for minority candidates.

But we are not so far removed from the days of Jim Crow, fire-hose crowd control and lynchings that we have completely grown out of the institutionalized racism of “old times not forgotten.”

Indeed, though institutions have made great strides toward equal opportunity, we see race-based social drift and structural segregation.

It’s conditions like these that incubate the very alienation and racial separatism the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act are still needed to combat.