1. WHY THE SELMA CAMPAIGN

In 1964 Lyndon Johnson felt he had done enough on the issue of civil rights. The Civil Rights Act of July 1964 had defined a sixth grade education as literacy, and in those localities where the literacy test was used it now had to be written. Still, realizing the need for more, in late 1964 Johnson directed Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to draft more effective voting rights legislation. In his state of the union address of January 1965, LBJ did pay lip service to the need for federal legislation to eliminate every remaining obstacle to voting. But Johnson realized that the nation was not eager to take up the issue, and he made no promises as to when he might introduce legislation (Matusow, The Unraveling of America, p. 181). Privately, LBJ said that there could not be a new civil rights bill in 1965 because there had just been one in 1964. Voting rights legislation was on Johnson's "back burner." LBJ was also increasingly preoccupied with the civil war in Vietnam, and believed that the government of South Vietnam could not survive unless American ground troops were introduced--and he ordered ground troops into Vietnam in March 1965. Martin Luther King urged a sweeping voting rights bill, immediately. But Johnson saw the political balance of forces differently, and was opposed.

King disagreed, and his advisors chose Selma for a new campaign just the way they had chosen Birmingham. Selma had an Afro-American voting-age population of 15,000. Only 383 were registered to vote in 1965 (Matusow, The Unraveling of America, p. 181). SCLC knew how racist Selma was. They knew Sheriff Jim Clark would lose his temper and over-react the same way Bull Connor had. Just as King had set a trap for Bull Connor in Birmingham, SCLC would now set a trap for Sheriff Clark in Selma. Selma was a repeat, and replay, of Birmingham. And it worked to perfection once again.

2. SELMA

King went to Selma to dramatize to the nation that even though the Civil Rights Act said citizens should be registered if they had a sixth grade education, in the South the power structure found other ways to evade the law. People who went to the court house to apply were met by police with batons and clubs who pushed them down the steps and told them the court house was closed. The white supremacists changed the room where registration was taking place, or only processed a few applications a day. The fact was that hundreds of thousands of Afro-Americans still could not vote in the Deep South. King hoped to sway public opinion, especially Northern white public opinion, to demand federal intervention to enforce the theoretical right to vote. He wanted the white North to stop being a bystander and to intervene on the side of the oppressed and disenfranchised Afro-Americans, against the oppressor (the white supremacists in the South). In Mississippi, only 6% of voting-age Afro-Americans were registered to vote. In Alabama it was 19%. In Louisiana it was 32% (Matusow, p. 181).

Matusow adds:

Once he [King] had employed nonviolence to persuade racial oppressors of their guilt and to change their hearts. Many broken heads later--in fact, by Birmingham, 1963--he had come to direct his campaigns not at the heart of the South but at the conscience of the North, seeking primarily to enlist the coercive power of the federal government against racial injustice. Success now hinged on the readiness of southern whites to meet nonviolence with fists and clubs--or else the North would not be moved (Matusow, p. 181).

Using Brown's Chapel as their headquarters, King and John Lewis began leading a mass voter registration effort on January 18. On February 1st King was arrested. On February 4th, two weeks before his assassination, Malcolm X arrived in Selma, at Brown's Chapel. At this time King was in jail. Seated next to Coretta Scott King on the dais, Malcolm X expressed support for what King was doing. He added that what King was doing was right, and the white power structure ought to give King what he was asking for, because if King's nonviolent approach didn't work, there were other people who had a different way. Recall that in June 1963 Kennedy himself had fretted that if the moderate approach of King did not yield results, Afro-Americans would turn to "black nationalists." This phrase black nationalists was a codeword for Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam.

3. JIMMY LEE JACKSON

On February 5th sympathetic congressmen arrived to investigate, and on the 9th King flew to Washington to meet with Johnson. The president promised to send a voting rights message to the congress "very soon" (Matusow, p. 182). However on February 17 events took a tragic turn. In the nearby town of Marion, a state trooper chased down and shot and killed 26-year old Jimmy Lee Jackson. In response, on March 3rd, King announced he would lead a march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery. On Saturday, March 6 Alabama Governor George Wallace banned the march on the grounds that it would impede traffic on the highway.

4. BLACK SUNDAY: THE EDMUND PETTUS BRIDGE

Simultaneously Attorney General Katzenbach warned King of a plot against his life, and King returned to the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. On Sunday, March 7, 1965 Hosea Williams of SCLC and John Lewis of SNCC led 600 marchers onto the Edmund Pettus Bridge, on U.S. Highway 80, outside of  Selma. Wallace had given orders that under no circumstances was the march to be permitted. The Alabama state troopers ordered the marchers to disperse, and two minutes later a phalanx of state troopers attacked the marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge with tear gas and clubs. Sheriff Clark's mounted police joined the fray, looking like Cossacks out of tsarist Russia. Some succumbed to the gas. Others were brutally beaten. Many were trampled in the panic. Afterwards Andy Young tried to calm the angry marchers at Brown's Chapel. The media was there to show the whole world the unbelievable scene of peaceful marchers being tear-gassed, clubbed, beaten, trampled. As fate would have it, ABC was showing the movie Judgment at Nuremberg, about Nazi War criminals that evening. The network interrupted the movie with scenes of the bloodletting at Selma. This incident was a turning point for the movement. The violence on that bridge assured the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Birmingham and Selma were for America what Tienamman Square was for China, except with the opposite outcome. Americans could not believe that this was happening in America. It looked like South Africa or the old Soviet Union. Even George Wallace was embarrassed by what happened, and swore it was not what he had intended. In Atlanta, King was horrified. He vowed to return to Selma and said that on Tuesday he would lead a second march himself. And he fired off two hundred telegrams appealing to clergymen from around the country to come to Selma to join him (Matusow, p. 183).
 

5. THE WHITE CLERGY GO TO SELMA

And something astonishing happened. A firestorm of condemnation swept the white North and West. White liberals were furious. More than 450 white clergymen and rabbis rushed to Selma to place their bodies on the line and stand in solidarity with King and Afro-Americans against racism and brutality. The purpose of this gesture was to express by their presence their solidarity with the black movement. These people of conscience were saying to the white supremacist South that not all white people agreed with white supremacy. Every citizen of this country has the right to vote. We cannot suspend majority rule simply because the majority happens to be black in this county or that one. Here a segment of the white community was saying to another segment of the white community, "what you are doing is wrong." They were also saying "white people also have a responsibility to speak out against racism, not just the black people who are the victims of racism." These clergypeople were saying that when the white community is silent, in the face of white racism, it condones that racism and allows it to continue. The only way that white racism can be stopped is if white people of conscience confront the racism in the white community. These clergypeople understood that oftentimes white people will listen to each other, and to another white person, in ways that they will never listen to black people. If a black person says it, it is dismissed as "Oh, he's just saying that because he's black." In any case, when white liberals rushed to Selma to stand in solidarity with King, this was in fact the high point of the coalition between blacks and whites in the civil rights movement. No one could know, in 1965, that within two years the liberal coalition would fragment, become polarized and disintegrate.

6. SELMA DRAMATIZES NEED FOR A VOTING RIGHTS BILL

At great risk to his standing with activists in the movement, King decided to compromise. He led a march onto the bridge, and kneeled and prayed, and then turned back. His followers had not known before-hand that this would happen. Many were disappointed, and many were very critical of him. It is possible that King did not take everyone into his confidence, beforehand, about what he planned to do, because he feared they would not all understand, and some might refuse to obey (go along with what he was asking). As Andrew Young explained, if the activists had marched in defiance of the federal court order, the Alabama state troopers would have brutalized them with the full sanction and blessing of "enforcing the law."

7. JAMES REEB

Later that evening, a white Unitarian minister from Boston, Reverend James Reeb was killed by a gang of white hoodlums. Protesters gathered at the White House to condemn Johnson because he was not doing anything, and Johnson was shocked. He had said he would be the president that finished what Abraham Lincoln had started. And now there were protesters across the street from the White House denouncing him. The events in Selma made LBJ look bad. He felt the heat. And he was so angered by the death of Reverend Reeb that he went on national television to condemn the murder of a man of God.

The white North, especially the liberal middle class, was outraged. King had proven his point, or better yet, the violence of Sheriff Clark and the state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and the hoodlums who murdered Reverend Reeb, had proven his point. Selma dramatized that even after the Civil Rights bill of 1964, black people seeking to register to vote and to march peacefully could be brutalized. The events in Selma, 1965, like the events of Birmingham before it, in 1963, changed the consciousness, the understanding, of the nation. Selma dramatized the problem of continuing disfranchisement in the South, and revealed the South as still an aberrant region. As always, white supremacy discredited itself through the usual resort to violence and terrorism.

The death of Reverend Reeb also moved white Northerners in a way that the death of Jimmy Lee Jackson or any other Afro-American did not. Once again the death of a white ally advanced the cause of the movement and helped to do for the Afro-American movement what Afro-Americans could not do for themselves in a white dominated society. But this also rubbed raw a wound that was festering in the relationship between oppressed Afro-Americans and their white allies. LBJ sent flowers to the bereaved widow of Reverend Reeb. Why, Afro-Americans wanted to know, did the president send no flowers to the bereaved mother and family of Jimmy Lee Jackson? Did the members of his family grieve any less because he was black? This double standard was like a knife in the heart of the biracial coalition between Afro-Americans and liberal Euro-Americans.

Martin Luther King went to Selma to FORCE Lyndon Johnson's hand, and compel him to do something that he did not want to do. And that is exactly what happened. Again, scholars call this nonviolent coercion rather than nonviolent persuasion. But Johnson hated being forced to do something before he himself was ready to do it.

8. JOHNSON GOES TO CONGRESS

In any case, Johnson now had no choice but to ask Congress for a voting rights bill. Accordingly he gave a televised address to the Congress on March 15th.

In his address, Johnson said

"Every device of which human ingenuity is capable has been used to deny this right. The Negro citizen may go to register, only to be told the day is wrong, the hour is late, the official in charge is absent. If he persists, and manages to present himself to the registrar, he may be disqualified because he did not spell out his middle name or because he abbreviated a word on the application.

If he manages to fill out an application he is given a test. The registrar is the sole judge of whether he passes the test. He may be asked to recite the entire Constitution or explain the most complex provision of state law. Even a college degree cannot be used to prove that he can read and write.

For the fact is, that the only way to pass these barriers is to show a white skin. (Muse, p., 57).

9. CONTENT OF THE BILL (this is the most important part for purposes of AFro-Amer History II)

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed the House of Representatives 328-74, and the Senate 79-18. Johnson signed it on August 6th.

The Voting Rights Act finally attacked the literacy tests. In those counties where fewer than half of all the adults had voted or been registered to vote on November 1, 1964, the literacy test and good moral character test were immediately suspended, for five years. The statistics would be taken as presumed evidence of discrimination. In counties where discrimination persisted, and local registrars would not register Afro-Americans, the Federal Government would have the power to send in federal registrars to temporarily take over the job of voter registration.

Essentially the Federal Government said to the local counties, "You have two choices. Either you register the people to vote, or we will come in and take it over and we will do it for you. Now which way do you want it?" No locality wants to lose its power to the Feds. But in those counties that had proven themselves recalcitrant, federal registrars stepped in and registered the voters themselves. This was real teeth, real enforcement. And in fact this worried some moderates, because they feared it would set a dangerous precedent for the Federal Government intruding into states rights and local affairs. Maybe next the government would step into determining what was taught in the schools rather than leaving it up to locally elected school boards. The Republicans expressed this fear. In any case, federal registrars only had to be sent to 62 counties (Matusow, p. 188).

The areas in which fewer than half the people had voted or been registered to vote were: Mississippi; Louisiana; Alabama; Georgia; South Carolina and Virginia, as well as 39 counties in North Carolina, and the state of Alaska, and one county each in Maine, Idaho and Arizona (Matusow, p. 186). There could still be intimidation in states that did not have literacy tests, such as Texas, Florida and Arkansas. To cope with this, the attorney general was given discretionary authority to send federal examiners into counties where voting discrimination might exist in the absence of literacy tests (Matusow, p. 187).

The most controversial provision of the Voting Rights Act was the so-called "pre-clearance" section. In order to insure that covered states did not simply pass new legislation to obstruct Afro-American voter registration, the covered states were prohibited from enacting any change in "voting qualifications or prerequisites to voting, or standard, practice or procedures with respect to voting" without first obtaining clearance from the attorney general or a federal district court in Washington, D.C. Thus these states had an affirmative burden to secure federal permission to change their voting laws (Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court, p. 903). In addition, the VRA rests upon the power of the Congress, under the Fifteenth Amendment, to enforce the amendment (Section Two: "The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.")

The Voting Rights Act was challenged in the courts. South Carolina maintained that the pre-clearance section violated the Tenth Amendment, which reserves to the states, or the people, those powers not enumerated in the Constitution. In 1966, in the case of South Carolina v. Katzenbach, the Supreme Court ruled that "As against the reserved powers of the states, Congress may use any rational means to effectuate the constitutional prohibition of racial discrimination in voting." (Oxford Companion, p. 902). Only Justice Hugo Black objected.

Furthermore, in March 1966, (Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections) the Supreme Court invalidated the poll tax in ALL  elections, not just federal elections.

In addition, the VRA was extended for five years in 1970. The extension of 1970 extended the ban on literacy tests to the nation as a whole, not just the states that were affected by the triggering mechanism of 1965. In 1975 the VRA was extended for an additional seven years. When it was due to expire in 1982, it was again extended. In 1982 it was extended 25 years, to 2007. However a new "bail-out procedure" was added, whereby a state can bail-out of the pre-clearance requirement if it can show that it has not discriminated for ten years and has made efforts to promote minority voting. Senator Bob Dole of Kansas pushed for the extension in the Senate.
 
 

10. AFRO-AMERICANS REGISTER TO VOTE IN THE SOUTH

In 1962 out of more than 5 million Afro-Americans of voting age in the 11 former Confederate states, only 1,386,654 were registered to vote. (Muse, p. 58). Within 2 months after passage of the VRA, 110,000 more Afro-Americans were registered to vote.

Within a year, an additional 1,289,000 blacks were registered to vote.

By 1968 the percentage of black registered voters increased from 19% to 53% in Alabama; from 32% to 60% in Louisiana; and from 6% to 44% in Mississippi (Matusow, 187-188). For the most part, the VRA was a success. But in history, when one problem is addressed a new one, or two, pops up. Increasingly the problem with voting would become not registration but getting people to exercise the right.

In 1964 King's campaign of 1963, in Birmingham, bore fruit. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was King's greatest accomplishment, even though he was not a Congressman. Without Birmingham and the civil rights movement it is almost inconceivable that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would have been passed by Congress. King deserves as much credit for being the father of that act of legislation as John Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson. In 1965 King produced again. The Selma campaign is what moved the nation to pass the Voting Rights Act. King's efforts "delivered." Segregation that was required by law, and disenfranchisement, came to an end.

But in the moment of triumph the ghetto of Watts, Los Angeles exploded. Afro-Americans were sick unto death of police brutality by the LAPD, and fought back and rioted for 5 days in August 1965. America was brought face to face with the problems of police brutality and the ghetto. Segregation had been peeled away. Disenfranchisement was being peeled away. But racially motivated police brutality and the ghetto were still there. Housing discrimination was still there. Inferior education in inner-city ghetto schools was still there. Belatedly, King discovered the problem of the Northern and western ghettos. His successes in the South did not make one iota of difference in the quality of life for Afro-Americans trapped in the ghetto. After 1965, King turned his attention to the North. His Northern white allies were rendered uncomfortable. Now he was pointing to the mess in their backyard, where they lived. His allies began to fall away. For MLK, after 1965, the story was all "downhill."