The Voting Rights Act turns 40

Michael E. Ross Reporter • Profile • E-mail

On March 7, 1965, 600 people protesting frustrated efforts to register black voters in Alabama began a 54-mile march to the statehouse in Montgomery to commemorate the killing of a young civil rights worker three weeks earlier.

Their route would take them over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, spanning the Alabama River.

“It was so orderly, we were so peaceful, we were so quiet walking 600 strong,” said Rep. John Lewis, today a Georgia congressman, back then a young civil rights activist. “We came to the highest point on the bridge, and down below we saw a sea of blue.”

Alabama police and state troopers, some on horseback and brandishing billy clubs, tear gas and whips, ordered the marchers back. Instead, the marchers, people of all races, knelt in prayer. Then the lawmen advanced.

“They were beating us with nightsticks, trampling us with horses, releasing the tear gas,” Lewis told MSNBC TV in an interview in March. “I was hit in the head by a state trooper with a nightstick. I thought I was going to die. I was going in and out of consciousness, and I could hear people hollering and crying, the horses’ hooves on the pavement.”

Turning point
What happened that day on a bridge named for a Confederate general was an event many see as a turning point in the pursuit of civil rights in the United States, one that led to two more Selma-to-Montgomery marches and five months later to passage of the Voting Rights Act.

FREE VIDEO Remembering ‘Bloody Sunday’ Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., who was in Selma in 1965 at the march on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, talks about the anniversary of ‘Bloody Sunday’ with MSNBC-TV’s Alison Stewart. MSNBC

As lawmakers and activists mark the law’s anniversary 40 years after President Johnson signed it into law on Aug. 6, 1965, there is a consensus that the Voting Rights Act is one of the most effective laws in U.S. history, standing with Brown vs. Board of Education as an enduring example of the nation’s living up to its original principles.

Setting the stage
The Voting Rights Act was passed to help enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments and stymie the efforts of state governments determined to maintain the segregationist status quo. It also sounded the death knell for the Jim Crow laws that were central to economic exploitation of blacks for more than 100 years.

The law was the culmination of years of gathering frustration with the nation's resistance to change. But the fuse for that transformation was lit by events long before 1965.

• Since the end of Reconstruction, in 1867, some state governments had tried to roll back voting by black voters, either rewriting state constitutions or instituting poll taxes and literacy tests.
• In 1944, spurred by the legal groundwork of NAACP counsel (and later Supreme Court justice) Thurgood Marshall, the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling, Smith vs. Allwright, banning all-white primary elections in Texas and setting the stage for the first tentative increases in black and Hispanic voter registration in Texas and in other states.
• In September 1957, President Eisenhower signed into law a civil rights bill protecting voting rights for African Americans, the first such civil rights legislation passed into law since Reconstruction.
• The March on Washington, in August 1963, lent the civil rights movement the moral high ground in defining the American ideal and framed the debate on the rights of America's citizens in populist terms.
• The murder of NAACP voter registration organizer Medgar Evers outside his home in 1963 and the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964 were two other horrors that galvanized lawmakers and citizens into action.
• The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banning discrimination in housing, public accommodations and voting was signed into law weeks after James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, three civil rights workers who had been registering black voters during Freedom Summer, were slain in Mississippi.

‘A sense of righteous indignation’
The assault on the Selma marchers was seen by many as the final insult in the battle for civil rights. But the public soon was solidly behind the movement, thanks in part to television.

Slide show   The fight for the right to vote More than 40 years ago, in an attack that became known as Bloody Sunday, Alabama state troopers beat civil rights activists marching for voting rights. See images from that infamous day and later marches that put the issue before the nation and pushed Congress to act.

Like the war in Vietnam that was just beginning to explode into America's living rooms, the incident in Selma was broadcast on the evening news, reaching Americans in their homes by the millions.

CBS and NBC, which had recently expanded news programs to a half-hour, both broadcast the march and its aftermath; CBS produced a special report on the event, and ABC interrupted a prime-time movie to air footage of the assault.

“The nation saw what had happened,” Lewis said. “People couldn’t stand it. They saw the photographs in the newspapers and magazines. They saw the video on television. There was a sense of righteous indignation.”

No longer an abstraction, the civil rights struggle became a collective national experience.

The historic significance of the Voting Rights Act can be measured by the changes the law ushered in and that still resonate today.

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