Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Voting Rights Act of 1965
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Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Voting Rights Act of 1965
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Overview
Vivid descriptions of violence and courageous acts fill David Garrow’s account of the momentous 1965 protest at Selma, Alabama, in which the author illuminates the role of Martin Luther King Jr. in organizing the demonstrations that led to the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Beyond a mere narration of events, Garrow provides an in-depth look at the political strategy of King and of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He explains how King’s awareness of media coverage of the protests—especially reports of white violence against peaceful African American protestors—would elicit sympathy for the cause and lead to dramatic legislative change. Garrow’s analysis of these tactics and of the news reports surrounding these events provides a deeper understanding of how civil rights activists utilized a nonviolent approach to achieve success in the face of great opposition and ultimately effected monumental political change.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504011549 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 02/17/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 353 |
| Sales rank: | 624,734 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Garrow’s other books are Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.: From “Solo” to Memphis, and Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade. He also served as a senior adviser to Eyes on the Prize, the award-winning PBS documentary series on the civil rights movement.
David J. Garrow is a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian who is presently professor of law and history and Distinguished Faculty Scholar at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. Garrow, who earned his PhD from Duke University, is an acclaimed scholar of the United States’ black freedom struggle and reproductive rights movement, as well as of the US Supreme Court. His definitive biography of Martin Luther King Jr., Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was honored with the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for biography and the seventh-annual Robert F. Kennedy Book Award.
Garrow’s other books are Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.: From “Solo” to Memphis, and Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade. He also served as a senior adviser to Eyes on the Prize, the award-winning PBS documentary series on the civil rights movement.
Read an Excerpt
Protest at Selma
Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Voting Rights Act of 1965
By David J. Garrow
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1978 Yale UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1154-9
CHAPTER 1
Black Voters and the Federal Voting Rights Enforcement Effort in the South, 1940–1964
As the starting point of the civil rights movement, many writers have chosen either May 17, 1954, the day on which the Supreme Court handed down its historic ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, or December 1, 1955, the day on which Mrs. Rosa Parks's refusal to move to the rear of a segregated bus ignited the Montgomery bus boycott. The true beginning of black southerners' political emergence, however, goes back to a day in early April of 1944, when another Supreme Court ruling signaled the culmination of one effort and, in certain ways, the beginning of another. Smith v. Allwright represented the next to last installment in a series of rulings that have come to be called the Texas white primary cases; it was the first instance in which the Court ruled that black citizens could no longer be prohibited from participating in political party primary elections on account of their race. It made possible "the initial political mobilization of Negroes" in the twentieth-century South.
When the Supreme Court's ruling in Smith v. Allwright was handed down, black voter registration in the eleven southern states stood at a level not substantially higher than that to which it had been reduced by the disfranchising efforts of the late nineteenth and very early twentieth centuries. Black registration in 1940 was estimated by the foremost expert of the period to be no more than 151,000, which represented only 3 percent of the approximately 5 million southern blacks of voting age. In three states—Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi—the estimated statewide black registration totaled only two thousand in each.
With the downfall in 1944 of the white primary, which a number of authorities have characterized as "the most effective" barrier to black registration and voting, "the number and proportion of Negroes registered to vote in the southern states increased with startling speed." The effects were first seen in the elections of 1946, and nowhere were they more noticeable than in Georgia, where the incumbent governor, Ellis Arnall, was ineligible to succeed himself. Arnall and the Democratic State Committee worked to facilitate black registration and voting in the hope that such votes would aid the candidate of the Arnall faction, James V. Carmichael, in his primary race against the well-known white supremacist Eugene Talmadge. Their effort centered on Atlanta, where they openly funded a black registration drive headed by the NAACP state secretary, A.T. Walden, and carried out by the Georgia Association of Citizens' Democratic Clubs, a group of black political clubs whose total membership exceeded 15,000. As a result of that drive, approximately 100,000 new black voters were registered, and some 85,000 black citizens cast ballots in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, which Carmichael nevertheless lost to Talmadge.
Two years later, in the 1948 Democratic gubernatorial primary, some 65,000 to 70,000 blacks turned out in an unsuccessful effort to defeat Talmadge's son, Herman. Despite this second loss to their most vocal opponents, Georgia blacks could take some comfort in the fact that some 125,000 of them, almost 20 percent of those of voting age, were now registered, a more than sixfold increase in eight years.
These record black turnouts in Georgia were mirrored in several other southern states, such as Texas, where 75,000 voted in the 1946 Democratic primary, and North Carolina, where 40,000 turned out in that same year. But in each of at least four Southern states—Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina—less than 5,000 black citizens voted. Georgia's reaction to Smith v. Allwright thus was unrepresentative of suffrage developments in the other four Deep South states.
Throughout much of the South, Smith v. Allwright stimulated a "search for a legal substitute for the white primary and precipitated a crisis in southern politics." In several states the initial reaction was to devise some means for continuing the white primary in spite of Smith. Without exception, however, these attempts were struck down by the federal courts, and southern legislators were forced to adopt other tactics. Most turned to the many opportunities for discrimination available in discretionary registration systems administered at the county level. By giving substantial discretion to the local white registrar, who was, as Key noted, "a law unto himself in determining the citizen's possession of literacy, understanding, and other qualifications," legislators could restrict black registration with a minimum of effort.
The first and most extensive effort to revise and expand the qualifications for voter registration came in Alabama in 1946, where first the legislature and then the state electorate in a referendum approved an alteration in the state constitution known as the Boswell Amendment. This provision specified that all future applicants for registration be able to read and write, to understand and explain any portion of the United States Constitution, to demonstrate their understanding of the duties and obligations of citizenship, to prove that they possessed "good character," and to prove that they had been regularly employed for the past year. Although this package of new requirements soon was ruled unconstitutional by a three-judge federal court, the failure of the Boswell Amendment signaled not the end but the beginning of southern legislatures' attempts to devise new methods by which black applicants for registration could be rejected.
While the majority of Deep South registration officials strove to minimize black registration in their jurisdictions, their application of the discretionary tools that their legislatures provided proved to be a good deal more porous, especially in urban areas, than the white primary had been. Black registration figures for late 1947, the first area-wide compilation done in seven years, reflected that fact clearly. Whereas the 1940 southern black registration total had barely exceeded 150,000, within seven years it had grown to just short of 600,000, and within five more years it grew to slightly more than one million. While the 1947 figures showed that two states, Alabama and Mississippi, had managed to keep their black registration totals at approximately 5,000, within five years black registration was to increase no less than fourfold even in these more restrictive southern states.
As the 1952 registration totals partially reflect, black registration in the South continued to increase at a moderate rate throughout the early 1950s. While this progress, given its very gradual nature, went almost without public attention, the southern racial climate experienced a quantum change literally overnight as a result of the Supreme Court's May 17, 1954 ruling in Brown. Within one to two years after the Brown ruling, southern politicians and state officials developed a sharpened appreciation of the growing black electorate and its possible influence. Hence, for the first time in several years southern legislators once again began to devote substantial attention to the possible ways by which this growth could be halted or even reversed.
The two states in which this reaction to increases in black registration was most pronounced were Mississippi and Louisiana. In the former, legislators added a literacy requirement to the state's existing provision that each applicant be able to interpret to the registrar's satisfaction a section—any section—of the lengthy and complex Mississippi state constitution. Needless to say, the great majority of black applicants had found that the registrars, who seemed always to present blacks with particularly difficult sections, were impossible to please. While this added literacy test further hindered prospective black registrants, local Citizens' Councils in a number of cases managed to "persuade" those blacks already registered to "voluntarily" remove their names from the rolls. The classic case of this sort of "persuasion" occurred in Sunflower County, where within a few months black registration fell from 114 to zero. All in all, in 1955 fourteen rural Mississippi counties had not a single registered black voter.
In Louisiana a more extensive and organized effort to purge the names of black voters from the rolls was conducted under the direction of a state senator who headed a legislative committee designed to foster segregation. Beginning late in 1954, the senator and his chief counsel traveled the state distributing a pamphlet, "Voter Qualification Laws in Louisiana—The Key to Victory in the Segregation Struggle," and encouraging parish registrars and local political leaders to reexamine previously approved registration applications for errors and omissions on the basis of which a voter's registration could be revoked. Their recommendations were adopted most enthusiastically in the north-central parishes of the state. In twelve such parishes during 1956 and 1957, between 10,000 and 11,000 black voters were removed from the rolls, with parishes such as Red River, Bienville, and Webster experiencing up to 99 percent "success." In Ouachita Parish, black registration dropped from 5,782 to 595 in two months in 1956. East Feliciana Parish's 1956 black registration total of 1,361 had declined to 82 by 1960. All in all, between 1956 and 1959 black registration dropped in forty-six of Louisiana's sixty-four parishes, and the decline in the statewide total registration was minimized only by the fact that some 50 percent of Louisiana's black voters lived in or about New Orleans.
While the black registration situations in all of the other southern states during the years of "massive resistance" were not all similar to that in Louisiana and Mississippi, throughout the South in the late 1950s black progress in adding voters to the rolls was very limited at best, with only sizable gains in North Carolina and Tennessee enabling the southern total to continue its slow creep upward. Throughout the long swath of the Black Belt, running from southside Virginia to northern Louisiana and southeastern Arkansas, where the black percentage of the population was highest and black registration historically the lowest, reported incidents of economic and physical intimidation of prospective black voters increased. The economic dependence of most rural blacks on local whites not only often dissuaded many blacks from attempting to register in a hostile climate; it also made the use of physical force unnecessary in quieting those who did undertake political activity. Physical threats, however, and actual murders, such as that of George Lee in Mississippi, were certainly not rare. Potential black voters in Mississippi's Lowndes County in 1956 received anonymous death-threat letters, while a year later a series of bombings and burnings in northern Florida's Liberty County convinced nine of the ten registered blacks to remove their names from the rolls. As Margaret Price observed at the time, "For Negroes in some sections of the South, an attempt to exercise their right of franchise as Americans seemed a greater risk in 1958 than at any time since the outlawing of the white primary in 1944." Looking beyond those hard-core areas and surveying black registration levels across the South, Price concluded, "Currently, it cannot be said that either the proponents or opponents of equal suffrage are winning."
Such was the black registration situation in the South in the mid and late 1950s when the federal government began to exhibit its first real interest in eliminating or at least reducing the barriers to political participation faced by southern blacks. Although the Roosevelt and Truman administrations had made some efforts in the civil rights field, as of mid-1955 the Eisenhower administration had taken few steps in civil rights and had shown no discernible interest in black southerners' voting rights. Late in 1955, however, a group of urban Republicans, looking ahead to the 1956 elections and the growing number of votes being cast by northern blacks, urged Attorney General Herbert Brownell to consider the introduction of some civil rights legislation by the administration. Throughout the first several months of 1956 the possibilities were discussed within the administration, and after some jockeying among liberal Republicans in Congress, Brownell, and various White House officials, all of the provisions drafted by the Justice Department were presented to the Congress, in spite of some apparent White House objections, in the second week of April.
The complex and hazardous legislative journey experienced by the provisions that ultimately emerged on September 7, 1957 as the Civil Rights Act of 1957 has been detailed by a number of other writers. The law as enacted had five titles. The first established for two years a United States Commission on Civil Rights. The second established a Civil Rights Division and a new assistant attorney general within the Justice Department. The third provided for Justice Department intervention in civil suits brought by private citizens alleging denial of their civil rights. The fourth outlined the attorney general's authority to file civil suits in federal district courts seeking injunctive relief against violations of the Fifteenth Amendment's prohibition of racial discrimination in voting. The fifth dealt with criminal contempt proceedings and jury trials in cases where a violation of an injunction was alleged.
Some commentators complained that whatever muscle the original provisions had possessed had been deleted by Congress. The heart of the act as passed, however, was title 4. It amended section 1971 of title 42 of the United States Code by adding three subsections that prohibited actual or attempted intimidation or coercion of potential registrants or voters, gave the attorney general the power to institute civil actions seeking injunctive relief in voting rights cases, and gave jurisdiction over such suits to the federal district courts.
Almost an entire year passed before the newly constituted Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department filed its first voting rights case under title 4. In that action, U.S. v. Raines, the government sought to end discrimination by the Terrell County, Georgia, registrar of voters. Six months later the department filed a second suit, U.S. v. Alabama, aimed at the board of registrars of Macon County. On the heels of that action came the initial ruling in the Raines case, in which District Judge T. Hoyt Davis held that the 1957 act was unconstitutional. Shortly thereafter another setback was suffered when, in the wake of the resignations of the Macon County registrars, District Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr. denied relief on the grounds that the state of Alabama, which the department sought to cite in the absence of any registrars, could not be sued under the provisions of the 1957 act, which had spoken of actions against "persons."
A more positive result was obtained in the department's third suit, U.S. v. McElveen, when in January 1960 another federal district court upheld the constitutionality of the 1957 act and ordered the restoration of the names of 1,377 purged black voters to the voting rolls of Louisiana's Washington Parish. One month later the Supreme Court affirmed that ruling at the same time that it reversed and remanded Judge Davis's order in the Raines case. In April of 1960 the Justice Department also was able to settle a fourth case, U.S. v. Fayette County Democratic Executive Committee, which had sought to end a white primary conducted by that organization in southwestern Tennessee, with the entering of a consent decree.
This limited record of voting rights litigation during the last three years of the Eisenhower administration soon came under strong criticism. Some of the blame was apportioned to the Justice Department's implementation of the provisions of the act, but inherent weaknesses in those provisions were also cited. Allan Lichtman, for instance, placed most of the blame on the assistant attorney general for civil rights, Wilson White. Under White's leadership, Lichtman wrote, the division "adopted a narrow, inflexible approach which precluded a full exploitation of the powers provided by the legislation." Instead of seeking to learn of discriminatory registrars, the division authorized an FBI investigation of a particular county's registration system only upon receipt of a formal, written complaint from someone in the locale alleging violations of federal law. Given the extremely limited, in many cases simply nonexistent, legal knowledge and advice available to rural southern blacks in 1960, such formal complaints were few indeed.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Protest at Selma by David J. Garrow. Copyright © 1978 Yale University. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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Table of Contents
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Tables
- Preface
- Introduction: Voting Rights and Protest
- 1. Black Voters and the Federal Voting Rights Enforcement Effort in the South, 1940–1964
- 2. Selma and the Voting Rights Act: Commencement and Climax
- 3. Selma and the Voting Rights Act: Crisis and Denouement
- 4. Reactions and Responses: Selma, Birmingham, and Civil Rights Legislation
- 5. Congressmen, Constituents, and the News Media
- 6. Enforcement and Effects: The Voting Rights Act and Black Political Participation in the South, 1965–1976,
- 7. The Strategy of Protest and the SCLC at Selma
- Notes
- Index
- About the Author