AN AMERICAN CITIZEN VOTING—SURELY THERE IS NOTHING REMARKABLE about that. But for an African American living in the Deep South in the 1960s, such as the person pictured on this book’s cover, it was a forbidden act, a dangerous act. There were nearly impossible obstacles to overcome: poll taxes, literacy tests, and hostile registrars. If a person succeeded and was allowed to vote, his name was published in the local newspaper, alerting his employers and others equally determined to stop him. The black men and women who dared to vote lost their jobs, their homes, and, often, their lives.
And yet they persevered. They marched on county courthouses, confronted sheriffs, and went to jail. In Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965, a day remembered as Bloody Sunday, they endured a brutal attack from state troopers and local vigilantes. That event touched the conscience of the nation, forcing President Lyndon B. Johnson to place a voting rights bill at the forefront of his political agenda. Its passage permitted millions of African Americans to vote in Alabama and elsewhere in the South. The Voting Rights Act transformed American democracy and in many ways was the last act of emancipation, a process Abraham Lincoln began in 1863.
This book tells the story of the struggles of ordinary people, many unknown to most Americans, who were, in fact, quite extraordinary. They risked all to obtain a fundamental American right that had been codified in the Constitution’s Fifteenth Amendment, though it was not fulfilled until 1965. Since then the Voting Rights Act has been repeatedly challenged. Not only has it survived, but it has also been expanded to protect other minorities facing similar obstacles. Those challenges, however, persist, and the Act’s most potent provision may soon face its ultimate test before the US Supreme Court, which may well strike it down. But if that should occur, it will not deter those who fought for its creation, battled to expand it, and struggled to maintain it. The fight will go on in courtrooms and, perhaps again, in the streets. The essence of the Voting Rights Act can never be destroyed, for as Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in 1963 while imprisoned in a Birmingham jail, “I have no despair about the future. . . . We will reach the goal of freedom . . . all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom.” And we can also take comfort from the nineteenth-century abolitionist Theodore Parker’s words that King famously quoted at the conclusion of the historic Voting Rights march: “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”1
THE SIGNING INTO LAW OF THE 1965 VOTING RIGHTS ACT WAS THE culmination of a struggle almost one hundred years in the making. Prior to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, only five states—all in New England—allowed black men to vote, and when New York joined their ranks, it required that they own property. In the South almost all blacks were considered property and, as slaves, were prohibited from voting. No sooner had the Civil War ended than former slaves and free black men began demanding the right to vote throughout the South. Meetings and rallies were held in Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Georgia, Alabama, and Washington, DC, where, in January 1866, the National Convention of Colored Men, with delegates from twelve states, both North and South, demanded “the right of impartial suffrage.” They hoped that President Andrew Johnson would come to their aid.2
He did not. In a stormy meeting with Johnson that February, the new president, a Tennessee racist more sympathetic to poor southern whites than to slavery’s victims, told a delegation headed by Frederick Douglass that black voting was a “hollow, unpractical idea” that would “cause great injury to the white and colored man.” Johnson despised Douglass, the former slave whose brilliance as a writer and orator had made him an international celebrity. “I know that damned Douglass,” Johnson later told an aide. “He’s just like any other nigger and he would sooner cut a man’s throat than not.” Under Johnson, “Presidential Reconstruction” permitted the former rebellious South to rejoin the Union easily and resume their political—if not personal—subjugation of its black population. It was left to the Republican-dominated Congress to assist the former slaves.3
During the period later known as “Radical Reconstruction” Congress, in 1866, passed and sent to the states the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, providing black people with the rights of citizenship and legal equality but not the right to vote. Because Johnson resisted all these efforts, Congress’s Reconstruction Act, passed over Johnson’s veto in 1867, divided the South into military districts occupied by federal troops and prohibited the former confederate states from returning to the union until they ratified the new amendment. The Fifteenth Amendment, passed in 1869 and ratified in 1870, prohibited the federal or state governments from denying any American’s voting rights “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” thereby granting an entire generation of black men—many of them former slaves—the right to vote and, with it, the chance of winning political office. (Their wives and daughters would not receive that right until the Nineteenth Amendment was adopted in 1920, but they too were politically active, organizing meetings and often acting as armed guards protecting those who gathered to discuss the issues of the day.)4
Radical Reconstruction brought southern blacks political freedom, and they embraced it enthusiastically. As many as two thousand served as state legislators, city councilmen, tax assessors, justices of the peace, jurors, sheriffs, and US marshals; fourteen black politicians entered the House of Representatives; and two became US senators. But the new era of black activism did not last long: Northern support declined, a conservative Supreme Court abolished many of the laws designed to assist black citizens, and terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camellia destroyed black schools and churches and murdered at will.5
By 1877 southern white Democrats had overthrown every new state government and established state constitutions that stripped black citizens of their political rights. To circumvent the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, legislators created clever devices that would disenfranchise black citizens for the next eighty years. These included not only literacy and “understanding” tests, poll taxes, and residency and property requirements; among these devices was also a “grandfather clause” that exempted white men and their male descendants from literacy tests and property qualifications if they had voted prior to January 1, 1867. That date was important because it was three years before the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed black citizens that right and just before the all-white Democratic Party primary barred black candidates from political participation. The new laws gave the greatest power to local registrars, usually appointed by state governors, who would choose which applicant succeeded or failed. The intent of the laws was explicit: “The plan,” said one Mississippi official in 1890, “is to invest permanently the powers of government in the hands of the people who ought to have them—the white people.”6
The laws were disastrous for newly empowered black citizens. In Louisiana 130,000 had been registered to vote in 1896. By 1904 only 1,342 remained to exercise the franchise, if whites permitted it. Virginia’s 147,000 black voters were reduced to 21,000. Eighty-three percent of Alabama’s electorate was again white in 1906, compared to only 2 percent of theoretically eligible black adults. “At first we used to kill them to keep them from voting,” declared an Alabamian, but “when we got sick of doing that we began to steal their ballots; and when stealing their ballots began troubling our consciences, we decided to handle the matter legally, fixing it so they couldn’t vote.” By the early twentieth century black disenfranchisement, like economic and social segregation, was complete throughout the South, and it remained almost unchanged for the next sixty years.7
THE DIGNITARIES WHO CROWDED INTO THE US CAPITOL’S STATUARY HALL on August 6, 1965, to witness the signing of the Voting Rights Act were well aware of the injustices that the new legislation was intended to redress, though most had never experienced them directly. The attendees included US senators and representatives, military officers and diplomats, business and labor leaders, clergy and educators, cabinet members and Supreme Court justices, and even a US president’s daughter, Luci Baines Johnson. Almost lost in that crowd was a special group who had experienced these injustices directly and had long fought for voting rights. So for these guests, seeing the president of the United States create a law that would at last put the federal government decisively on the side of African Americans as they registered and voted made this day especially exciting.8
Among the witnesses was Rosa Parks, the fifty-two-year-old former seamstress best known as the woman whose defiance touched off the first modern mass African American revolt in December 1955 after she refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus. Her friends knew this was no accident of history. She was a long-time committed activist and NAACP official who, since the early 1940s, had secretly organized meetings of Montgomery’s Voters League, preparing black citizens to register and vote, an effort that might cost them their jobs or even their lives. She quickly came to symbolize a woman who not only encouraged black people to register but also possessed the courage to try to do so herself. Her first attempt ended in failure, as did the second. Taking the exam a third time, she copied her answers to use as evidence in a lawsuit if the Board flunked her again. Perhaps the three registrars realized who they were dealing with, because this time, in 1945, she passed. The next obstacle was paying the $1.50 poll tax. It didn’t seem like much, but black voters were required to pay it retroactively, so Parks, at forty-two, paid $16.50, “a considerable amount of money,” she later noted. Following the bus boycott she continued working to register black citizens who were still denied the right to vote.9
Thurgood Marshall was there. Just three weeks earlier President Johnson appointed him Solicitor General of the United States, the first African American to be so honored. Marshall was already a legendary figure in the civil rights community. As the NAACP’s premier lawyer, on numerous occasions he had rushed south to aid black prisoners languishing in jail cells on trumped-up charges. At the same time that he appeared before local magistrates who considered him unqualified to be a member of the Bar, he argued cases before the Supreme Court of the United States. During one such case, in 1944, he argued that a Texas white-only primary was unconstitutional. In Smith v. Allwright, eight of the justices agreed. When other southern states refused to accept the decision on the grounds that it covered only Texas, federal judges ruled against them. These successes encouraged thousands of black southerners to try to register. Although he would later be celebrated for winning the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, it was his victory in Smith v. Allwright, he told one interviewer, that gave him the greatest pride. “Without the ballot,” he often said, “you have no citizenship, no status, no power in this country.” With it, anything was possible.10
Charles Evers was also waiting for President Johnson that day. Nearly twenty years earlier Smith v. Allwright gave him and his younger brother Medgar, both Mississippi veterans of World War II, a chance to vote against a man they despised, Senator Theodore Bilbo, who was seeking renomination in the July 2, 1946, Democratic primary. Bilbo, a virulent racist, wanted blacks deported to Africa, supported the poll tax, fought antilynching legislation, and, above all, opposed black suffrage. “If you let a handful go to the polls, . . . there will be two handfuls in 1947, and from there on it will grow into a mighty surge,” he warned his supporters. “The white people are sitting on a volcano, and it is up to you red-blooded men to do something about it.” The Jackson Daily News, which had endorsed Bilbo, told black voters: “DON’T TRY IT. . . . Staying away from the polls . . . will be the best way to prevent unhealthy and unhappy results.”
The Evers brothers managed to register in Decatur, their hometown (the state legislature had exempted all veterans from paying recent poll taxes), and accompanied by a group of fellow black veterans, they went to the courthouse to vote that July morning. There they found twenty armed men barring their way. One yelled, “You niggers are going to wind up getting yourselves killed and everyone around you killed.” Charles, always more quick-tempered than Medgar, had brought a gun with him and tried to use it. Medgar stopped him, telling him, “Charley, it ain’t worth it.” The brothers and their friends left, followed by a black Ford, whose passenger pointed a shotgun at them all the way home. Angry, they decided to arm themselves and return to the courthouse. But they did not really want a bloody confrontation with men, many of whom they knew since childhood, so they left their guns in the car. As they approached the polling place, they again faced a hostile crowd and left, this time for good. “I was born in Decatur, was raised there, but was never in my life permitted to vote there,” Medgar Evers later said.11
What occurred next was extraordinary, a sign that a new generation was entering the fight for voting rights. Although Bilbo easily won the nomination, the NAACP and the newly formed Progressive Voters League complained that Bilbo’s intimidating statements had kept thousands from the polls and urged the Senate to impeach him. The Senate’s Committee on Campaign Expenditures agreed to hold hearings in Jackson, the state capital, in December. Few black activists were optimistic: The Committee was chaired by Louisiana Democrat Allen Ellender, Bilbo’s close friend, and the other members were either southerners or Republicans who cared little about voting rights. Ellender refused to permit NAACP lawyers to act as counsel for witnesses who would appear voluntarily, so many feared that few if any would risk testifying against Bilbo. But to everyone’s surprise, two hundred black Mississippians, mostly veterans, appeared at the segregated courthouse on December 2 seeking to testify. Vernando R. Collier, a veteran and NAACP official in Gulfport, testified that as he and his wife approached the polling booth in city hall, a group of white men stopped them, then began beating and dragging them from the building. Others described numerous violent incidents that occurred that day, and some testified about their unsuccessful efforts to register to vote.
The committee eventually found Bilbo innocent of any charges meriting censure, but the newly elected Republican Congress, sensing an opportunity for mischief, refused to seat him. The matter ended some months later when Bilbo succumbed to cancer.12
Medgar Evers became the NAACP’s first field secretary in Mississippi in 1954, a post he held with distinction until his assassination in 1963. Following his death, Charles Evers assumed his position. In 1969, thanks to the Voting Rights Act, black voters in Fayette, Mississippi, elected him mayor, the first of his race to win the office since Reconstruction.
John Doar, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, was also seated in Statuary Hall that morning. Bored with his Wisconsin family law practice, he joined the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in 1960, three years after the Civil Rights Act of 1957 authorized its creation. The Act also gave the attorney general new powers to prosecute those who obstructed voting in federal elections, but the legal route was filled with obstructions and almost inevitable failure. Doar, unwilling to trade one stuffy law office for another, soon went south to see personally what black Americans experienced when they tried to register to vote. On a trip to Haywood County, Tennessee, he visited a rural church and met sharecroppers, all of whom had been evicted from their land simply because they tried to register. Their courage affected him profoundly and convinced him that his original decision to leave Wisconsin had been correct. He was now on the front lines of a historic struggle against injustice, and there was no other place he would rather be.13
These and other trips to Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana showed Doar the inadequacy of the 1957 law and its similarly weak successor passed in 1960. Doar’s efforts in Dallas County, Alabama, told the tale. In 1961 only 1 percent of eligible black citizens were registered to vote compared to their white counterparts, 64 percent of whom had encountered no difficulties and could vote. After finding reliable witnesses willing to risk testifying to alleged discrimination in open court before a hostile judge, Doar filed his first lawsuit on April 13, 1961. But the trial did not occur until May 1962—thirteen months later. It took an additional six months for the judge to issue his decision. Judge Daniel Thomas declared that the registrars had indeed been guilty of discrimination, but because they had resigned their posts and had been replaced by a new board, presumed innocent of wrongdoing, there was no need to issue an injunction prohibiting discrimination. Doar appealed Judge Thomas’s decision to the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which ruled in September 1963 that discrimination had occurred but rejected the Department’s request that it order registrars to evaluate the suitability of black applicants as it did whites. Nearly three years of legal efforts had met with failure. And discrimination in Dallas County continued.14
Doar’s experiences, along with those of other members of the Civil Rights Division who were also in Statuary Hall that day, had helped shape the Act. They hoped that this legislation, by giving the federal government the authority to intervene directly to guarantee black people the right to vote, would at last eliminate literacy tests and end the power of southern registrars.
John Lewis was there. At twenty-five he was already a veteran activist, leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and a man who had seen the inside of more jails than a career criminal. He had begun fighting for voting rights in Selma, Alabama, in 1963, two years before Martin Luther King Jr. chose that city to create a crisis that would force President Johnson to send a voting rights bill to Congress. In 1965 Lewis had almost died on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge in the assault that had paved the way for the event he was celebrating this day.15
And of course, King himself was present for the signing of the Voting Rights Bill. Although trying to desegregate some of the South’s most dangerous cities had occupied his time recently, winning the right to vote was always high on his agenda. On May 17, 1957, in an event at the Lincoln Memorial called to commemorate the third anniversary of the Brown decision, King told a crowd of twenty-five thousand that disenfranchisement was a form of slavery. “So long as I do not firmly and irrevocably have the right to vote I do not possess myself,” he said. “I cannot make up my mind—it is made up for me. I cannot live as a democratic citizen, observing the laws I have helped to enact—I can only submit to the edict of others.” Therefore, “our most urgent request to the president of the United States and every member of Congress is to give us the right to vote.” That request was ignored then, but now, more than eight years later and at the cost of three lives, it had been answered.16
He was surprised that he had lived to see this moment, having told colleagues that he had expected to be assassinated during the voting rights campaign. Another threat had also haunted him: J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI had long wanted to destroy King and his movement, and in recent months they had very nearly succeeded.17
Parks, Doar, Lewis, and King shared one other similarity besides their presence in the Hall that day: they were all either Alabama-born or had spent time in the state in the course of their work, and their experiences there had profoundly affected their lives. As one of the most extremely segregated states in America, Alabama had become a decisive battleground in the struggle for civil rights, and it would be instrumental in the passage of the Voting Rights Act. “Mark it well: Alabama passed this law,” the Alabama Journal would complain on August 9, three days after the signing ceremony in Washington. No other southern state played such an important role in the history of the civil rights movement—from the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 desegregating public accommodations, to the brutal events in Selma that resulted in the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Ironically, Alabama’s intense racial divisions made these civil rights victories possible.18
Parks and Lewis both called Alabama home. In 1961, the same year Doar filed his first lawsuit against the registrars of Dallas County, Alabama, an angry mob in Montgomery beat Lewis badly while he was working as a Freedom Rider. Montgomery had also launched King’s career as both pastor (at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church) and as leader, first of the city’s famed bus boycott and, eventually, the civil rights movement itself. In many ways, then, the story of the Voting Rights Act and its defenders is also the story of Alabama and the depredations and struggles that took place there.
The date of the bill’s signing, August 6, had been picked specifically for its historical significance. On that day in 1861 President Lincoln had signed the Confiscation Act, freeing all slaves who were being used to aid the Confederacy; that act was a precursor to the Emancipation Proclamation, which liberated the rebel states’ remaining slaves. To assure that no one missed the connection between the sixteenth president and the thirty-sixth, President Johnson had ordered his lectern placed so that he would be flanked by Lincoln. When the president arrived in the Statuary Hall at noon, he took his place to the left of Gutzon Borglum’s celebrated bust of Lincoln, a likeness that also adorned Mount Rushmore. To Johnson’s right was Vinnie Ream’s marble statue of the Great Emancipator, commissioned by Congress in 1866 when the talented female sculptor was just eighteen. To heighten the historic nature of the occasion, Johnson also evoked the spirit of George Washington: behind him was John Trumbull’s immense portrait depicting the Surrender of Cornwallis.
The president’s speech, televised nationally, also reflected a sense of history. Johnson reminded viewers and the assembled dignitaries that the bill he was about to sign into law was long overdue. “To seize the meaning of this day we must recall darker times,” Johnson said. “Three and a half centuries ago the first Negroes arrived in Jamestown. . . . They came in darkness and they came in chains. . . . When the Liberty Bell rang out in Philadelphia it did not toll for the Negro. When Andrew Jackson threw open the doors of democracy they did not open for the Negro. It was only at Appomattox a century ago that an American victory was also a Negro victory. Yet for almost a century the promise of that day was not fulfilled.”
Now, when the Voting Rights Bill became law, “that promise will be kept,” the president declared. “Today, we strike away the last major shackle of those fierce and ancient bonds. . . . The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.”19
Speaking to his southern brethren, Johnson asked them to accept the changes in “habit and custom” brought by recent civil rights laws—changes that would liberate white as well as black citizens. “Today I say simply this: It must come,” Johnson said. “It is right that it should come and when it has you will find a burden that has been lifted from your shoulders, too.” To the black members of his national audience, he offered a challenge: “you must register; you must vote. . . . Your future and your children’s future depend upon it and I don’t believe you’re going to let them down.”
His remarks finished, Johnson then invited his audience to watch the signing of the bill in the President’s Room, located on the Senate side of the capitol, where Lincoln had signed the Confiscation Act 104 years earlier. More than a hundred people followed Johnson into the small, richly furnished chamber. Johnson sat behind a mahogany desk, the very desk he had used when he was Senate majority leader. It too was specially selected because the president wanted Americans later to have a physical object that reminded them that Lyndon Johnson was the one who brought about this historic achievement.20
The president methodically scratched “Lyndon B. Johnson” at the bottom of the last page of the document, after each stroke bestowing a pen on those who had helped make this day possible. At least fifty were passed out. Vice President Hubert Humphrey received the first pen, Senator Everett M. Dirksen, the Republican minority leader who had helped draft the bill, the second, and Senator Robert Kennedy, the third. Handing one to Dr. King, Johnson, who had always disliked King’s public demonstrations, told him his work was now done, that the time for protest was over.21
Even at a moment of glory, Johnson couldn’t resist a bit of revenge. He ignored CORE leader James Farmer, who had annoyed the president by refusing to call off demonstrations during the 1964 presidential campaign. Heretofore, Farmer had always had a good working relationship with Johnson, but after this incident he could no longer reach the president by phone and received only perfunctory notes written by an aide. Hoping to receive one of the pens, Farmer had intentionally seated himself near the president’s desk, but as he later wrote, “It seemed everyone in the room got a pen . . . except me. The president passed pens to my right, to my left, over my shoulders, but not to me, all the while his eyes avoiding mine.” Roy Wilkins tried to help by pointing at Farmer and yelling, “Jim Farmer, Mr. President, Jim Farmer. Give Jim a pen!” Nothing happened. Then, Whitney Young, Urban League director, called out, “Here’s Jim, Mr. President. Jim Farmer. He hasn’t got a pen yet.” Finally, Farmer walked up to the president and took a pen from his hand while Johnson looked elsewhere.22
Following the signing ceremony, King and other civil rights leaders (but not Farmer) met privately with the president at the White House. All still felt the glow of the ceremony. “There was a religiosity about the meeting.” a presidential aide recalled. “[It] was warm with emotion—a final celebration of an act so long desired and so long in achieving.”23
Absent that day were other men and women whose names were less well known than the president and the preacher but whose actions were essential to the successful passage of the Act. Missing, for instance, was Amelia Boynton, who, with her husband, Sam, began their fight for voting rights in Alabama in the 1930s, when Martin Luther King was a child. Sam Boynton’s efforts ruined his business and his health. Missing too were Bernard Lafayette and James Forman, two young members of SNCC who went to Selma in 1962 and 1963 and helped create the movement King relied on when he arrived in 1965. The voting rights movement needed enemies as well as friends, and those roles were played masterfully by Jim Clark, the sheriff of Dallas County, and Governor George C. Wallace. Their brutality aroused the conscience of the nation and intensified Johnson’s desire to push for an immediate voting rights bill. Had Clark and Wallace been invited, it was unlikely that they would have come, but the fact remains that without their actions, there might have been nothing to celebrate that day.
The history of the Voting Rights Act is filled with similar ironies and accidents. Whereas Selma, Alabama, was ground zero in the struggle, it was the death of a young activist, Jimmie Lee Jackson, in nearby Marion that actually led to the march on “Bloody Sunday,” which shocked the nation and probably assured the passage of a law to protect the rights of black voters. That event was almost canceled; when it occurred on Sunday, March 7, 1965, Martin Luther King, whose movement benefited the most from the ensuing police brutality, was not even there. During these and many of the other stages in the story of the Voting Rights Act, as Lyndon Johnson noted in the most famous speech of his presidency, “history and fate” came together “to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom.”24
That search continues. First enacted in 1965, the Voting Rights Act has been reexamined by Congress and then extended four times—in 1970, 1975, 1982, and in 2006. Each time the Act has been amended to meet changing times and circumstances. It will undergo congressional scrutiny again in 2031. Few deny its importance; it ended a half-century of practices that prevented African Americans from exercising what Johnson called “the most basic right of all,” and it transformed American politics by turning a once-solid Democratic South into a Republican stronghold. But the Act nevertheless has powerful critics who believe that it has served its purpose and that the election of America’s first African American president proves that it is no longer needed. Among such detractors are Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, both of whom have expressed doubts about the Act’s necessity, thereby raising the possibility that the Court might soon abolish it. To others, the Act is a fundamental part of American law and must be preserved without major change.25
It is impossible to understand fully the significance of the Voting Rights Act to people on both sides of this debate without first considering how the Act came about and why. The story of its creation and of the forgotten men and women who risked their lives to dramatize the need for such an act should form the foundation for any assessment of its ongoing importance. Marked by heroism and sacrifice, oppression and triumph, the origins of the Voting Rights Act reveal both its necessity and its promise.
Despite its empowerment of millions of black Americans, the future of the Act remains in doubt. Although it did succeed in eliminating many of the fundamental injustices that prevented black citizens from voting, some have endured, and should the Act be overthrown by the Supreme Court or significantly revised by a hostile Congress, the sacrifices of those who labored in its behalf will have been in vain. The circumstances that gave birth to the Act may not have an exact parallel today, but their echoes can be found across the country in more subtle and more insidious efforts to prevent black people from having a voice in the nation’s future. Only by knowing its history, then, can we truly appreciate what the Voting Rights Act achieved and how it remains necessary to preserve American freedom.