Bloody Sunday
Professor Heather Cox Richardson at Boston College details Bloody Sunday in her “Letters from An American,” how it relates to the SCOTUS decision in 2013, and the signing of an Executive Order by President Joe Biden “to promote voting access and allow all eligible Americans to participate in our democracy.”
Some of us were around in 1963 and would read the events of the day in the newspapers which were delivered to our door. At 14, I can not say I understood the issues associated with March 7th. I do remember at 18 watching the white foreman screaming at a Black tuckpointer when we were 20 or so stories up and on a scaffold. I still remember the hurt look on his face as he exited through a window. It was ugly.
The first line of Professor Heather Cox Richardson recital raises a point which is on the horizon for white America, “Black Americans outnumbered white Americans.” Minority Americans will outnumber White Americans in the near future. We had better learn to live with them.
This original recital of the events on March 7th is a good read.
“Black Americans outnumbered white Americans among the 29,500 people who lived in Selma, Alabama, in the 1960s, but the city’s voting rolls were 99% white. So, in 1963, Black organizers in the Dallas County Voters League launched a drive to get Black voters in Selma registered. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a prominent civil rights organization, joined them.
In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, but it did not adequately address the problem of voter suppression. In Selma, a judge had stopped the voter registration protests by issuing an injunction prohibiting public gatherings of more than two people.
To call attention to the crisis in her city, Amelia Boynton, who was a part of the Dallas County Voters League but who, in this case, was acting with a group of local activists, traveled to Birmingham to invite Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., to the city. King had become a household name after the 1963 March on Washington where he delivered the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, and his presence would bring national attention to Selma’s struggle.
King and other prominent members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference arrived in January to press the voter registration drive. For seven weeks, Black residents tried to register to vote. County Sheriff James Clark arrested almost 2000 of them for a variety of charges, including contempt of court and parading without a permit. A federal court ordered Clark not to interfere with orderly registration, so he forced Black applicants to stand in line for hours before taking a “literacy” test. Not a single person passed.
Then, on February 18, white police officers, including local police, sheriff’s deputies, and Alabama state troopers, beat and shot an unarmed 26-year-old, Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was marching for voting rights at a demonstration in his hometown of Marion, Alabama, about 25 miles northwest of Selma. Jackson had run into a restaurant for shelter along with his mother when the police started rioting, but they chased him and shot him in the restaurant’s kitchen.
Jackson died eight days later, on February 26. The leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Selma decided to defuse the community’s anger by planning a long march — 54 miles– from Selma to the state capitol at Montgomery to draw attention to the murder and voter suppression. Expecting violence, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee voted not to participate, but its chair, John Lewis, asked their permission to go along on his own. They agreed.
On March 7, 1965, the marchers set out. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a Confederate brigadier general, Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, and U.S. senator who stood against Black rights, state troopers and other law enforcement officers met the unarmed marchers with billy clubs, bull whips, and tear gas. They fractured John Lewis’s skull, and beat Amelia Boynton unconscious. A newspaper photograph of the 54-year-old Boynton, seemingly dead in the arms of another marcher, illustrated the depravity of those determined to stop Black voting.
Images of ‘Bloody Sunday’ on the national news mesmerized the nation, and supporters began to converge on Selma. King, who had been in Atlanta when the marchers first set off, returned to the fray.
Two days later, the marchers set out again. Once again, the troopers and police met them at the end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but this time, King led the marchers in prayer and then took them back to Selma. That night, a white mob beat to death a Unitarian Universalist minister, James Reeb, who had come from Massachusetts to join the marchers.
On March 15, President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a nationally televised joint session of Congress to ask for the passage of a national voting rights act. ‘Their cause must be our cause too,’ he said.
‘[A]ll of us… must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.’
Two days later, he submitted to Congress proposed voting rights legislation.
The marchers remained determined to complete their trip to Montgomery, and when Alabama’s governor, George Wallace, refused to protect them, President Johnson stepped in. When the marchers set off for a third time on March 21, 1,900 members of the nationalized Alabama National Guard, FBI agents, and federal marshals protected them. Covering about ten miles a day, they camped in the yards of well-wishers until they arrived at the Alabama State Capitol on March 25. Their ranks had grown as they walked until they numbered about 25,000 people.
On the steps of the capitol, speaking under a Confederate flag, Dr. King said:
‘The end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. And that will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man.’
That night, Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old mother of five who had arrived from Michigan to help after Bloody Sunday, was murdered by four Ku Klux Klan members tailing her as she ferried demonstrators out of the city.
On August 6, Dr. King and Mrs. Boynton were guests of honor as President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Johnson recalled ‘the outrage of Selma’ when he said
‘This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies.’
The Voting Rights Act authorized federal supervision of voter registration in districts where African Americans were historically underrepresented. Johnson promised that the government would strike down ‘regulations, or laws, or tests to deny the right to vote.’ He called the right to vote ‘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,’ and pledged that ‘we will not delay, or we will not hesitate, or we will not turn aside until Americans of every race and color and origin in this country have the same right as all others to share in the process of democracy.’
But less than 50 years later, in 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. The Shelby County v. Holder decision opened the door, once again, for voter suppression. Since then, states have made it harder to vote. And now, in the wake of the 2020 election, in which voters handed control of the government to Democrats, legislatures in 43 states are considering sweeping legislation to restrict voting, especially voting by people of color. Among the things Georgia wants to outlaw is giving water to voters as they wait for hours in line to get to the polls.
Today, 56 years after Bloody Sunday, President Biden signed an executive order ‘to promote voting access and allow all eligible Americans to participate in our democracy.’ He called on Congress to pass the For the People Act, making it easier to vote, and to restore the Voting Rights Act, now named the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act after the man who went on from his days in the Civil Rights Movement to serve 17 terms as a representative from Georgia, bearing the scars of March 7, 1965, until he died on July 17, 2020.
The fact sheet from the White House announcing the executive order explained: ‘democracy doesn’t happen by accident. We have to defend, strengthen, and renew it.’ Or, as Representative Lewis put it:
‘Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.'”
Really nicely done.
Ditto Anne. THX.
Yes, what King, and LBJ, done was nicely done. What we done? lately?
talked to ourselves.
I don’t want to get killed by some racist idiot myself, so I am not going to recommend any marches or demostrations where thatn can happen. But we do need to find a way to “get our country back” from the haters. Dis-electing Trump was a good first step.
Dis-enfranchising Confederate statues does not help.
I’d go for packing the Court if that’s what it takes. Not happy about that, but it IS Constitutional, and better than a Civil War.
Waiting to hear a better plan.
coberly:
I am going to introduce you to Infidel753. He has a blog also, partially runs Mike’s Blog (when it is his turn), and touches on those social issues such as banning Seuss books and taking down confederate statues,
It is here we get into tougher territory. Do you have the absolute right to do whatever you wish on private property? How do we decide such? J.S. Mill had a pretty good answer in “On Liberty” which you can read yourself.
I believe “rights or the practice of them are not absolute.” I do not want to take away from Infidel’s excellent post so I will give you his site address and you can read the rest of Some ruminations on books, statues, and canceling there . . .
Run
Thank you for this. I would love to have a long conversation with you and a few others over several weeks of coffee on this.
I think you have been missing my point: By attacking statues we feed into the enemy’s strategy and we are losing.
I personally don’t give a damn about statues, and I don’t think anyone else gave a damn about statues before “we” made an issue of it. In any case we don’t lose anything at all by leaving the statues alone.
I never met a person, even rather unpleasant racists who took the Confederate cause seriously… any more seriously than the Cubs vs the White Sox, or normal college football rivalries, or even Chevvies vs Fords.
And, just to make sure no one likes me, I personally get very, very tired of people who get their feelings hurt and wear those hurt feelings as a kind of demand the rest of us have a moral obligation to do something about it.
On the other hand, I had guns pointed at me during the Civil Rights era, because there were real issues at stake. The real issues are still out there… but we are changing the subject to statues… and losing the war because of it. I don’t expect anyone to tell me what a good boy I am for standing up for their human rights when it counted and when it was dangerous. But I do get tired of people who have never done a damn thing for their own civil rights except whine about it. And call me a racist because I don’t want to join them in their own pity party.
There is a huge difference between the blacks who stood up for civil rights in the sixties and before, and the racist-mongers today who are only looking for “reparations” or political power over their own people.
That said, the subject of Freedom, and Rights, gets pretty simple once you stop worshiping what some “great man” said 200 years ago, or weaseling your own mind to come up with something that agrees with what you want today.
The point of “democracy,” like the point of adversarial procedings in court, was to give people a chance to hear each other, correct each others mistakes or overreach, and arrive at answers to advance the welfare of all. That has been lost in win-at-all-costs politics and legal advocacy.
We don’t have any rights that we don’t give each other. Fine to think about that… and even to try give it some abstract general principles.. to help guide us around the traps we have built for ourselves in the past. But the way to live together… is to in fact learn what it means to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” i think that means talk to each other and try to come to agreements that don’t hurt anyone too badly.
Well
I left a lot out of that. I was expecting someone to point out the deficiencies. Because that’s the way we make progress.
But that may be the fundamental thing wrong with my argument: People do not “reason together”. they take sides and hold up signs. and that’s not even counting the really evil and disnonest ones.
I suspect Infidel of “writing.” that is arranging words in a semi complicated way to work around to a predetermined point… which i am guessing will be yes, we need to take down Confederate statues. Couldn’t tell what he believed about taking down Seuss. Kind of reminds me of the people who banned (tried to ban?) Huckleberry Finn, because he used the N word, and Jim, the hero of the story, was not college educated. and that kind of reminds me of the “Karens” on our side who self-righteously demand that other people stop doing whatever it is that offends their Karen sensibilities.
Coberly:
Did you read “the rest of the post by Infidel on his site?” I did give you the link.
Run
help me out here. i clicked on the link and found a hundred thousand titles with nothing to distinguish the one you are referring me too.