Selma and the Voting Rights Act, 1965
The Vote: The Unfinished Business of 1964
The 1964 Civil Rights Act had banned segregation in public accommodations, schools and federally funded programmes. It had not addressed voting. Across the Deep South, Black Americans were kept off the electoral roll by a network of devices that had grown up since the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s: literacy tests set arbitrarily by white registrars, poll taxes, the requirement to bring a registered voter to vouch for the applicant, and the threat of being sacked, evicted or beaten if you tried to register. In Selma, Alabama, county seat of Dallas County, only 2 per cent of voting-age Black adults were on the register in 1965, despite Black people being a majority of the population.
In 1965 only 2 per cent of voting-age Black adults in Dallas County, Alabama were registered to vote, even though Black Americans were the majority of the county’s population. Across Mississippi the figure was 6.7 per cent. The 1964 Civil Rights Act had not addressed voting.
Why Selma?
SNCC organisers had been working in Selma since 1963 to register voters and to organise local people who had borne reprisals for trying. In January 1965 the SCLC, fresh from a difficult campaign in St Augustine, Florida, agreed to come to Selma at the invitation of the local Dallas County Voters League. Martin Luther King chose Selma for the same reason he had chosen Birmingham: he expected the local sheriff, Jim Clark, to react with public violence. Clark’s deputies wore lapel pins reading ‘Never’.
The campaign opened with mass attempts to register that ran straight into Clark’s tactics — long queues kept standing for hours in the rain, arrests for ‘loitering’ on courthouse steps. By the end of February 1965, 3,000 Black activists had been arrested; King himself was jailed on 1 February. On 18 February 1965, in nearby Marion, state troopers shot a 26-year-old church deacon called Jimmie Lee Jackson while he was trying to protect his mother and grandfather from a beating. Jackson died eight days later. Out of grief and anger, the SCLC announced a march from Selma to the state capital Montgomery to deliver a petition to Governor George Wallace.
Bloody Sunday, 7 March 1965
On the afternoon of Sunday 7 March 1965, around 600 marchers set out from Brown Chapel in Selma. They were led by SNCC chairman John Lewis and SCLC organiser Hosea Williams. They walked in pairs along the pavement of US Route 80, crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River, and stopped where the road descended on the far side. A line of around 200 state troopers and Sheriff Clark’s mounted posse blocked the road. The troopers gave them two minutes to disperse. After ninety seconds the troopers attacked.
The marchers were charged with horses, beaten with billy clubs wrapped in barbed wire, and tear-gassed. John Lewis’s skull was fractured. Seventeen marchers were hospitalised and about fifty more were treated for lesser injuries. ABC News interrupted its scheduled film — Judgment at Nuremberg, a drama about the Nazi war-crimes trials — to broadcast 15 minutes of footage from the bridge. Forty-eight million Americans watched. Telegrams of protest poured into the White House through Sunday night. The day became known as Bloody Sunday.
King had not been on the bridge on Bloody Sunday. On Tuesday 9 March he led a second ‘turnaround’ march to the bridge, knelt, prayed and turned back to honour a federal restraining order. That night three white Unitarian ministers who had come south for the march were attacked in a Selma street; one, James Reeb, died of his injuries. Reeb’s death generated headlines and presidential condolences that Jimmie Lee Jackson’s had not — a fact King later spoke about with characteristic honesty. Federal District Judge Frank Johnson lifted the restraining order, and on 21 March a third march, this time legally protected by 2,000 federalised Alabama National Guard and 1,800 US Army troops, set off from Selma. By the time the marchers reached the Alabama State Capitol on 25 March they were 25,000 strong. King addressed them: ‘How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.’
President Johnson’s ‘We Shall Overcome’ Speech
On 15 March 1965, eight days after Bloody Sunday, President Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress and a national television audience. He announced he was sending Congress a federal voting rights bill, and named the cause as a moral one in language no white president had used before: ‘Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.’ The borrowing of the movement’s anthem from the lips of a Texan president was, for many in the SNCC and SCLC offices watching, the moment they realised the bill would pass.
The Voting Rights Act 1965
The Voting Rights Act 1965 was signed by Johnson in the Capitol Rotunda on 6 August 1965. It suspended literacy tests in any county where less than 50 per cent of voting-age adults had registered or voted in 1964. It authorised federal registrars to enrol voters directly in those counties — bypassing obstructive local registrars entirely. And under Section 5 it required state and local jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination to submit any change to voting rules to the US Department of Justice for pre-clearance, to prevent the cycle of new exclusions replacing the old. The 24th Amendment of January 1964 had already abolished the federal poll tax; the 1966 Supreme Court ruling in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections banned the state poll tax that remained.
In Mississippi, Black voter registration jumped from 6.7 per cent in 1964 to 59.8 per cent in 1968. Across the Deep South more than a quarter of a million Black voters were added to the rolls within five months of the Act being signed. Federal registrars enrolled about a third of them. The Act was the most effective single piece of civil rights legislation of the twentieth century. But the franchise alone did not address Northern de facto segregation, housing, policing, jobs, schools or wealth. The Watts riot in Los Angeles broke out five days after Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, killing 34 and signalling that civil rights legislation had not addressed the urban North. The movement’s next phase, and its splintering, would be over those questions.
The 1965 Voting Rights Act suspended literacy tests, sent federal registrars into counties with histories of discrimination, and required Justice Department pre-clearance of changes to voting rules. By 1968, Black voter registration in Mississippi had risen from 6.7 per cent to 59.8 per cent.