There is no such thing as a happy day at Arlington National Cemetery.
But in 2013, on a Wednesday in June, walking six feet above the bodies of those who had made the ultimate sacrifice for our nation—soldiers who had served every commander in chief from Lincoln through Obama; freed Black men who had worn the uniform of a country that had kept them in captivity; wives and husbands, daughters and sons of the fallen—I found myself feeling hopeful.
I was in Arlington, as I would be in Selma two years later, to mark a significant anniversary. Half a century earlier, Medgar Evers, a patriot who returned from the beaches of Normandy to lead the battle for civil rights in Mississippi, had been assassinated—and we had come together at the site of his burial to celebrate all the ways the seeds planted by his generation had flowered, even after the storms they had weathered.
But while I felt the progress we had made, as I stood atop the rolling hills of Arlington, that hallowed ground where four hundred thousand Americans with four hundred thousand unique stories are buried under four hundred thousand identical white marble headstones, I didn’t want to think about how far our country had come or where we were headed next. I wanted to live in the past, to sit with it, to remember it—not as a parable reinforcing the mythos of a country marching perpetually, inevitably, unstoppably toward perfection, but as a kaleidoscope of victories and defeats, steps forward and backward, progress won and then snatched away.
Unlike our founding, unlike Reconstruction, unlike the women’s suffrage movement, I didn’t study the civil rights movement in a history book. I watched it unfold on the screen of my family’s basement television in Queens, New York. So at Arlington National Cemetery, I wanted to remember what it actually felt like to live through that June day in 1963 when, before tragedy struck, the embers of the civil rights movement—the freedom rides and freedom songs, the sit-ins and speeches that had kept the candle of hope burning—exploded into an inferno.
That is the story I will tell in this chapter. It won’t be a linear one, and I won’t spend much time on the hopeful ending that I cover in the introduction, when history and fate met at a single time in a single place in Selma, Alabama. I will focus, instead, on what happened beforehand, on the tragedies that made the triumph of the Voting Rights Act possible.
I don’t know what emotions Medgar Evers felt in the moments before he was shot—when, just after midnight, he parked his car in the driveway, pulled a carton of JIM CROW MUST GO T-shirts out of his trunk, and started walking toward the front door of the home in which his wife and children were waiting up for him—but I would like to think he was proud. Because if he had turned on the news earlier that day, he would have seen that after the years he had spent speaking out for justice, the South was finally being forced to listen.
That morning, two African American students—James Hood, whose hat I remember thinking was a curious bit of style, and Vivian Malone, whose beauty I remember thinking was, well, I don’t think I had the words for it as a twelve-year-old—arrived at the University of Alabama with hope in their hearts and determination in their minds. They weren’t there to make a statement. They were there to receive the education they deserved. But in Tuscaloosa, in 1963, if you were Black, that was the same thing.
That’s because, even though close to a decade had passed since the Supreme Court ruled that separate institutions were inherently unequal in Brown v. Board of Education, the University of Alabama still hadn’t welcomed a single Black student into its halls. And the state had no intention of integrating its schools anytime soon. In fact, when James and Vivian showed up, accompanied by Nicholas Katzenbach, the deputy attorney general of the United States, they were blocked from accessing the door by Governor George Wallace himself.
If Medgar, like me, had watched this take place on his television, I imagine he wouldn’t have been surprised by any of it. He had met the same hostility as James and Vivian when he tried to integrate the University of Mississippi School of Law—whose administrators told him, a decorated World War II veteran, that even though he had risked his life defending our democracy overseas, he did not have the right to learn about the laws that governed it when he came back home.
But what might have surprised Medgar was what happened next—when President John F. Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard and left Governor Wallace with no choice but to step aside and clear the path for the students to walk through the front door and make history.
Even as a twelve-year-old in the North, for whom the segregation of the South had always seemed like it was taking place a world away, watching James and Vivian break this barrier unleashed emotions I didn’t know I had: Anger about all who had been denied this opportunity. Relief that the sacrifices of the civil rights movement were beginning to pay off. Fear about what kind of retribution lay ahead. And if I was feeling all that, I cannot even conceive of the variegated emotional responses being triggered by the limbic system of Medgar Evers, a man without whom this progress might have remained but a dream.
It was an emotional day for President Kennedy, too, who decided he should speak to the country—celebrating the courage of the students at the University of Alabama and committing the federal government to bringing an end to segregation. There was just one problem: He didn’t have a speech. And his chief speechwriter, Ted Sorensen, didn’t have time to finish drafting one. So with millions of Americans hanging on his every word, President Kennedy delivered a national address full of improvisation, an address in which some lines had been prewritten and others had come straight from the heart.
“One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free,” he said. “And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.”
Schools, he said, ought to be integrated—just as restaurants and theaters and stores should be—laying out the policies that would, after his assassination, become the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But he didn’t stop there, because he knew African Americans would only be treated as equal in their communities if they had a voice in electing the leaders in charge of them. So before concluding the speech, he laid out a vision that would later become the Voting Rights Act of 1965: “It ought to be possible,” he said, “for American citizens of any color to register to vote in a free election without interference or fear of reprisal.”
We don’t know if Medgar Evers had a chance to watch President Kennedy’s speech—but if he did, that line would have been especially meaningful to him. Because Medgar always believed that the right to vote was among the most important civil rights. And it was this right that had inspired him to join the fight for civil rights in the first place as a twenty-one-year-old. “We’re interested in making this country better for people, for all of us, and we feel that only through voting,” he explained, “are we going to be able to do this.”
In 1946, hoping to block the reelection of Theodore Bilbo—a racist senator who believed Black Americans should be sent to Africa—Medgar and his brother, Charles, registered to vote at city hall in Decatur, Mississippi. But when they and other registered Black voters arrived at the polls on Election Day, they were confronted by white supremacists who threatened their lives. “You niggers are going to wind up getting yourselves and everyone around you killed,” they were told, and knowing what that actually meant—knowing they could have ended up on the list of Black men from across the centuries who were murdered for daring to participate in democracy—Medgar and Charles, like so many African Americans in the South, went back home without casting their ballots.
So if you were Medgar Evers, and only two decades after that Election Day you watched the events in Tuscaloosa followed by the president of the United States promising to bring about universal suffrage, I bet you would have found some satisfaction in the fact that the protesting and picketing you did to make our democracy more inclusive had brought about change. I certainly was moved, even though in New York, the vote had been secure for generations.
But unlike me, Medgar had lived in Mississippi his whole life, and as a result, he would have known that the president’s words were just words, and it would take a whole lot more than that to bring democracy—real, legitimate, multiracial democracy—to the South.
After all, as Kennedy alluded to in his speech, President Lincoln had delivered the Emancipation Proclamation a full century earlier—and yet in states like Mississippi, the American apartheid formed after Reconstruction was as strong as ever, calcified and codified in the form of Jim Crow. And even with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments in place, the Supreme Court had refused to stop literacy tests and poll taxes from going into effect, ruling in the 1898 case Williams v. Mississippi that these laws “do not on their face discriminate between the races,” even though their racially disparate impacts could not be denied.
And it wasn’t only Mississippi.
In fact, as Ari Berman, author of the seminal Give Us the Ballot, writes in an article for Mother Jones: “By 1907 every Southern state had changed its constitution to disenfranchise Black voters.” And despite what the Supreme Court had said about intent, these laws proved to be extremely effective at blocking African Americans from participating in our democracy. To quote Berman:
The number of Black registered voters in Mississippi fell from 130,483 in 1876 to 1,264 by 1900; in Louisiana from roughly 130,000 in 1896 to 1,342 in 1904; in Alabama’s Black Belt counties from 79,311 in 1900 to 1,081 in 1901. By the early 1900s, only 7 percent of Black residents were registered to vote in seven Southern states, according to data compiled by the historian Morgan Kousser, and Black turnout fell from 61 percent of the voting-age population in 1880 to just 2 percent in 1912.
This is because, while the laws themselves may not have mentioned race, for the most part, they were only enforced on Black Americans—while whites were protected by grandfather clauses, which guaranteed the right to vote to anyone whose ancestors had been registered, regardless of whether they had passed a literacy test or paid a poll tax.
And as historian C. Vann Woodward, who wrote The Strange Career of Jim Crow in 1955, explained: “If the Negroes did learn to read, or acquire sufficient property, and remember to pay the poll tax and to keep the receipt on file, they could even then be tripped by the final hurdle devised for them—the white primary.”
The “white primary” is exactly what it sounds like: Starting in 1896, in states like Texas, Democrats began explicitly barring African Americans from voting in their primaries, a practice the Supreme Court upheld in the 1935 case Grovey v. Townsend on the basis that political parties—which ran the primaries—were private institutions. This meant that even if an African American managed to register to vote, he’d only be able to do so when the general election came around, when he’d be forced to choose between candidates he had had no say in nominating.
This complex web of laws and policies established a democracy of, by, and for white people—and only white people—in the South. But the truth was, the laws weren’t even the most important tool for maintaining white electoral hegemony. Because Jim Crow was never policed just by laws written out on paper. It was enforced with broken bones and crushed skulls, with rope wrapped around trees and knots tied around necks, with bodies displayed in town squares or made to disappear at the bottom of rivers.
Medgar understood this, which was why, even as he listened to the president of the United States talking about the need to expand access to the franchise, he would also have been aware—consciously, explicitly, relentlessly aware—that at any moment he could be murdered for the work he had done to expand the franchise in Mississippi. Not only because a Molotov cocktail had been thrown into his home earlier in the year; not only because a car had tried to run him over earlier in the week; not only because he and his wife, Myrlie, were so worried about an assassin barging into their house that they had their kids practice hiding in the bathtub; but also because Medgar had spent much of his adult life investigating the lynchings of Black men in Mississippi. And what that experience taught him was that if you were white, you could kill an African American man in broad daylight and face no consequences, even if there was no doubt that you had committed the crime or that the victim had done nothing to earn that fate.
That became clear to Medgar when he was thirty years old—and began looking into the case of a fourteen-year-old boy with a stutter who came down to the Mississippi Delta from Chicago during his summer break after seventh grade, only to return in a casket. The boy’s name was Emmett Till. And the story of how he died changed Medgar, and America, forever.
Just days after Emmett’s arrival in Mississippi in 1955, white supremacists tore him out of his bed in the middle of the night, mangled his body, ripped his eye out of its socket, tied a seventy-five-pound cotton gin fan to his back with barbed wire, shot him in the head, and threw him into the Tallahatchie River, where his body was left to rot for days, like human flotsam, all because Emmett had allegedly flirted with a white woman at a grocery store, an accusation she later retracted.
In the weeks following Emmett’s death, his mother, Mamie, was devastated, but she refused to be debilitated. “The world,” she decided, should “see what they did to my boy.” So she held an open-casket funeral, where photographers captured images of the fourteen-year-old’s body that helped birth the civil rights movement. But even with the eyes of the country on Mississippi, Emmett’s killers were eventually exonerated by a jury of twelve white men that deliberated for just sixty-seven minutes, including a soda break, before deciding to acquit. The verdict outraged Medgar, who had worked hard to identify witnesses for the case. And over the following years, he continued investigating the murders of Black men in Mississippi, including many who had been killed for no reason other than trying to exercise their right to vote.
This history was on Medgar’s mind during that week in June 1963, which was why he delivered a speech in Jackson on the possibility of his own assassination. “Freedom has never been free,” he declared. “I love my children and I love my wife with all my heart, and I would die, and die gladly, if that would make a better life for them.”
Days later, Medgar was shot by a member of the Ku Klux Klan outside his own home—where Myrlie had been talking to their children, who were up past their bedtime, kept awake by the kind of pride that comes from watching the president of the United States deliver a speech made possible by the courage of your daddy.
“I opened the door,” Myrlie remembered years later, “and there was Medgar at the steps, face down in blood.” The children screamed, “Daddy, get up!” as their neighbors flooded the driveway, lifted Medgar into Myrlie’s station wagon, and rushed him to the nearby University Hospital, where they were told he couldn’t be treated on account of the color of his skin. But when the hospital realized that this Black man was Medgar Evers, they changed their minds, allowing him to break one last barrier in his final moments, becoming the first African American the hospital had ever treated.
“But,” Myrlie recalled, “it was too late.” Within an hour, at the age of thirty-seven, Medgar Evers was declared dead—and the following week, his body was laid to rest beside his fellow veterans in Arlington, Virginia.
For three decades, his killer walked free—after two all-white juries failed to put him behind bars—but Myrlie, who went on to become the national chairwoman of the NAACP, refused to stop campaigning for a retrial, until, finally, in 1994, she got one, and the white supremacist who murdered her husband was sent to prison for life.
Standing next to Myrlie fifty years after her husband’s death, only feet from the resting place of his casket, I could not stop thinking about the last day of his life—because within those twenty-four hours, you could find the entire story of America, a nation where liberation so often leads to assassination, where broken barriers so often lead to pierced arteries, where hope and fear, love and hate, beauty and brutality dance together, swaying back and forth to the alternating beats of pain and promise.
So it was on June 11, 1963, a twenty-four-hour period marked by tragedy that put our country on the path to the triumph of the Voting Rights Act.
That day was on the mind of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., when, during his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington, he declared that “We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote.” It was on the mind of Lyndon B. Johnson when, later that year, in his first address to a joint session of Congress, he exclaimed that “no memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long.” And it was on the mind of Bob Moses, one of Medgar Evers’s fellow organizers in Mississippi, when he decided the civil rights movement in his state should coalesce around a single priority: securing the right to vote.
“The Mississippi monolith,” Moses wrote, “has successfully survived the Freedom Rides and the assassination of Medgar Evers, without substantive change.” Therefore, he argued, “The only attack worth making is an attack aimed at the overthrow of the existing political structure of the state.”
This mindset inspired leaders in Mississippi, including Fannie Lou Hamer, to organize the Mississippi Freedom Vote in 1963—a mock gubernatorial election they hoped would prove that if afforded the opportunity to vote, Black residents would turn out in droves. And they did, casting eighty thousand ballots across the state.
Building on this momentum, civil rights leaders in Mississippi conceived an idea that would change the course of history. The following year, they decided, they would welcome students from around the country to the Magnolia State, where they would travel from home to home, in town after town, organizing and registering Black voters. They would call the effort “Freedom Summer.” And their goal was to wake up the country to the fact that in the South, even with all the progress we had made, voting was still not a guaranteed right if you were Black, but rather still a privilege fiercely—often, violently—protected by white supremacists.
Over the course of the summer, about one thousand students came down to Mississippi to register voters—and two of them would never return: Andrew Goodman, a Jewish twenty-year-old from the Upper West Side of Manhattan; and Michael Schwerner, a twenty-one-year-old graduate student training to become a social worker.
When they arrived in Mississippi, the young men met James Chaney, a local organizer who had been a member of the civil rights movement since the age of fifteen, back when his decision to wear an NAACP badge to class led to a school suspension. Together, Andrew, Michael, and James crisscrossed the state of Mississippi registering voters—until, on June 21, 1964, they disappeared. Earlier that day, they had decided to head to the town of Longdale, a Klan stronghold, an undertaking they knew was risky, which was why, before they left, Schwerner told his fellow organizers to “start trying to locate us” if they were not back at a reasonable hour, a request he hoped they would never have to follow.
Shortly after pulling into town, the three men were arrested by Longdale police, held captive in cells for hours, and eventually released, only to be abducted as they drove back home. For forty-four days, which I remember feeling excruciatingly long as we waited for information, their bodies went undiscovered, with racist Mississippi senator James Eastland calling their disappearance a “publicity stunt.” But after an investigation led by the FBI—and overseen by President Johnson himself—it became clear that the students had met the same fate as Emmett and Medgar and the rest of the freedom fighters who had been murdered in Mississippi, killed as punishment for the crime of trying to make it easier for African Americans to vote.
Left to rest in an earthen dam, Chaney had been beaten, castrated, and shot three times before his death. Schwerner had received a bullet wound in the heart. Goodman had been buried alive, his body discovered with clay in his lungs and on his fists, a fighter until the end.
These were far from the first killings in Mississippi, but they caught the nation’s attention in a way previous murders never had—and the reason wasn’t a mystery. As Rita Schwerner, Michael’s wife, explained in an interview: “It is only because my husband and Andrew Goodman were white that the national alarm has been sounded.” Her analysis may have been blunt, but its accuracy was never in doubt: At the very site where Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman were found, investigators discovered eight other bodies nobody had ever even cared enough to look for until white men were laid to rest next to them.
This double standard was wrong—a death should be seen as a death, a murder should be seen as a murder, a lynching should be seen as a lynching, regardless of what the victim looks like—but it also presented the organizers of the civil rights movement with an opportunity. Suddenly, the country was paying attention to the South, which meant this was the perfect moment to begin building support for expanding access to suffrage.
That was why, a few months later, when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., entered the Oval Office in the week he won the Nobel Peace Prize, he did so with a simple demand of President Johnson: Pass a voting rights bill. This had long been one of Dr. King’s top priorities: “Our most urgent request,” he had declared in a 1957 speech at the Lincoln Memorial, “is to give us the right to vote.” And now, seven years later, he was done waiting for that request to be granted. Because he knew the progress the civil rights movement had made could be ripped away at any moment if African Americans couldn’t defend it at the ballot box.
In theory, President Johnson was on the same page. In fact, earlier in the year, he had yelled at his deputy attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach, “I want you to write me the goddamnest toughest voting rights act that you can devise.” But he also knew the odds of passing such a bill were low, especially after he had used so much political capital on the Civil Rights Act, and he didn’t want the rest of his agenda—including the Great Society initiatives he claimed would lift millions of Black Americans out of poverty—to be stalled by a filibuster.
“I’m going to do it eventually,” the president promised Dr. King, “but I can’t get voting rights through in this session of Congress.”
Perhaps Dr. King shouldn’t have been surprised by President Johnson’s hesitancy. This was, after all, a man who previously had been known to move with the political winds—opposing anti-lynching legislation one decade, shepherding the Civil Rights Act through Congress the next. But Dr. King believed the president when Johnson said he would bring a voting rights act to the floor of Congress as soon as it could pass. Which was why, on his way out of the White House, Dr. King quipped: “I think we’ve got to find a way to get this president some power.”
Within weeks, in January 1965, at Brown Chapel in Selma, where I would deliver remarks fifty years later, Dr. King marked “the beginning of a determined, organized, mobilized campaign to get the right to vote.”
The problem, of course, was that such a campaign was against the law in Selma, where a judge named James Hare, Jr., had issued an injunction banning groups of more than two people from even talking about civil rights—and a sheriff named Jim Clark had directed his officers to enforce that injunction with cattle prods and clubs, tear gas and fists. Soon after his arrival, Dr. King was imprisoned, alongside hundreds of his fellow organizers. “When the king of Norway participated in awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to me,” King wrote in a letter from his cell, “he surely did not think that in less than sixty days I would be in jail.”
With King behind bars, Malcolm X decided to pay a visit to Selma. “I think that the people in this part of the world would do well to listen to Dr. Martin Luther King and give him what he’s asking for and give it to him fast,” he threatened, “before some other factions come along and try to do it another way.” This was a different message from the one civil rights organizations in Alabama, including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), had been promoting, but it was a valuable counterbalance: It demonstrated that Black Americans would make their voices heard no matter what—if not with ballots, as Malcolm X was known to say, then with bullets. “What he’s asking for is right. It’s the ballot,” Malcolm continued. “And if he can’t get it the way he’s trying to get it, then it’s going to be gotten, one way or the other.”
Shortly after Dr. King was released from prison, Malcolm X was assassinated—and soon after that, Jimmie Lee Jackson joined him as a martyr of the civil rights movement, inspiring leaders on the ground, from Diane Nash and James Bevel to Amelia Boynton and John Lewis, to organize a march for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery.
We all know what happened next. Brutality on a bridge, beamed onto television sets across the country, including the one in my basement, shocked America out of complacency. Months after Dr. King and President Johnson’s meeting in the Oval Office, the heroes in Selma had fulfilled the civil rights leader’s promise of getting the president some power—power he wielded to rally the country around a bill that would protect voting rights.
And on August 6, 1965—with giants of the civil rights movement like Rosa Parks, John Lewis, and Dr. King looking on—President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law, fulfilling the promise of American democracy once and for all.
Vivian Malone was there, too, looking elegant as ever in white gloves. Just two years after the Stand in the Schoolhouse Door, she had already graduated from the University of Alabama—and was on her way to taking over the Voter Education Project from John Lewis. (I, meanwhile, came to learn that great beauty and determination ran in the women of the Malone family when I met and married Vivian’s younger sister, Sharon.)
In the years following the passage of the Voting Rights Act, millions of Black Americans across the South registered to vote and began electing public servants who looked like them for the first time since Reconstruction. One of these officials was Charles Evers, Medgar’s brother, who became a mayor in Mississippi only a couple decades after his life was threatened for even trying to vote.
And over the following years, we bore witness to what started to look like a rebirth of American democracy. Voting was no longer seen as a privilege. At long last, it had been recognized as a right, and a century after President Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address, we finally had a government of, by, and for the people—or, at least, more of the people than ever before. That wasn’t a victory for Black Americans. It was a victory for all Americans. And it’s worth taking a moment to consider how it was won.
The civil rights movement, like the founding of America, was a revolution—a battle whose foot soldiers broke laws they believed were unjust. To sanitize this would be to dishonor the courage of those who sat behind counters where they weren’t welcome, who spoke up when they were told to be silent, who peacefully withstood violence from the state in the fight for their freedom.
But make no mistake: This was not a revolution of people who didn’t believe in America. It was a revolution of patriots who loved America, who honored the words of the Declaration of Independence more than their oppressors ever did, who were clear-eyed about the ways their country had failed them but refused to give up on its promise. And there was no one who captured this spirit more than Medgar Evers—a man who defended our democracy against the Nazis overseas and then devoted his every waking hour to perfecting it when he got back home.
Despite all the evidence in front of him—despite the hatred, the violence, the discrimination he endured—Medgar never abandoned his belief in the idea of an America where all of us were equal. And that was why, in the face of death threats, he carried that carton full of JIM CROW MUST GO T-shirts up the driveway to his home. It was an act of hope, a demonstration of his belief that when your cause is righteous, you do not stop fighting until your final breath.
The next morning, when a nation that went to sleep to President Kennedy’s speech woke up to news of Medgar’s assassination, I can imagine there were people who believed Evers’s pursuit of justice had been quixotic—and who could blame them? A civil rights hero—a war hero—had been murdered, only hours after the president of the United States had called his cause “a moral issue…as old as the scriptures…as clear as the Constitution.” Could a country so cruel, so capricious, so contradictory ever be redeemed?
The jury was out. It still is. But all these decades later, what’s clear is that Medgar Evers wasn’t wrong to hold out hope. He was right, even if he never saw those seeds flower.
After all, if he hadn’t kept up the fight, those boys very well might never have come down to Mississippi to register voters; and if it hadn’t been for those boys, Martin Luther King, Jr., might never have ended up in Selma; and if Martin Luther King, Jr., hadn’t ended up in Selma, well, that’s the kind of counterfactual it’s not even worth contemplating—but let’s just say I don’t think that twelve-year-old in Queens watching it all take place on his TV set would have been standing in Arlington National Cemetery fifty years later, reflecting on the events of June 11, 1963, as the first African American attorney general of the United States.