958
Opinion of Stevens, J.
suggests that federal judges have an obligation to subscribe to the proposed narrow reading of statutory language, it is appropriate to supplement Justice Thomas' writing with a few words of history.
I
Justice Thomas notes that the first generation of Voting Rights Act cases focused on access to the ballot. Ante, at 894-895. By doing so, he suggests that the early pattern of enforcement is an indication of the original meaning of the statute. In this regard, it is important to note that the Court's first case addressing a voting practice other than access to the ballot arose under the Fifteenth Amendment. In Gomillion v. Lightfoot, 364 U. S. 339 (1960), the Court held that a change in the boundaries of the city of Tuskegee, Alabama, violated the Fifteenth Amendment. In his opinion for the Court, Justice Frankfurter wrote:
"The opposite conclusion, urged upon us by respondents, would sanction the achievement by a State of any impairment of voting rights whatever so long as it was cloaked in the garb of the realignment of political subdivisions." Id., at 345. "A statute which is alleged to have worked unconstitutional deprivations of petitioners' rights is not immune to attack simply because the mechanism employed by the legislature is a redefinition of municipal boundaries. According to the allegations here made, the Alabama Legislature has not merely redrawn the Tuskegee city limits with incidental inconvenience to the petitioners; it is more accurate to say that it has deprived the petitioners of the municipal franchise and consequent rights and to that end it has incidentally changed the city's boundaries. While in form this is merely an act redefining metes and bounds, if the allegations are established, the inescapable human effect of this essay in geometry and geography is to despoil colored citizens,
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