Eight days passed between the Bloody Sunday violence that erupted on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s speech before a joint session of Congress calling for passage of a voting rights act.
Eight days in which civil rights activists, law enforcement authorities, and the American people nervously waited to see what was next in the uncertain journey towards equality.
“What happened in that long and difficult week tells us much about the nature of power, the practice of politics, and the realities of the great struggle for justice,” says historian Jon Meacham.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author discussed the historic events of the 1965 voting rights struggle when he delivered the Wendell H. Ford Public Policy Lecture at the University of Kentucky’s Martin School of Public Policy and Administration recently.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 ended racial discrimination in voting and enacted ballot protections for all Americans. The legislation was so historic that Meacham says the law signaled the real end of the Civil War. But in the 50 years since, Meacham argues that it’s easy to think the act was an inevitable outcome of the Alabama protest march that made international headlines.
“The truth, however, is more complicated and more interesting,” Meacham says.
A Fitting Tribute to a Martyred President
Meacham, who has authored biographies of presidents Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and George H.W. Bush, contends there were three factors that led to the Voting Rights Act, the first of which regards another national tragedy: The assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Kennedy supported a federal civil rights bill, but Meacham says it’s fair to wonder how far the New England patrician would’ve pushed the legislation. Doing so put Kennedy at significant risk because he needed the southern Democratic vote to win reelection to 1964.
That question became moot when Kennedy was killed in November 1963 on a campaign trip to Dallas to help unite Texas Democrats ahead of the next year’s election.
When Vice President Lyndon Johnson succeeded Kennedy, Meacham says the civil rights cause gained a “master legislator and consummate political animal” to shepherd the federal legislation.
“Johnson was almost certainly better positioned, better able to manipulate the Congress and the nation into taking concrete steps to dismantle Jim Crow,” Meacham says.
The first step in that process, according to Meacham, was a deft move by Johnson to spend the political capital he acquired from the national sorrow over the assassination. Speaking to a joint session of Congress just five days after Kennedy’s death, Johnson told lawmakers that swift passage of the civil rights bill would be the most fitting tribute to the fallen leader.
“By linking the legislation to the martyred president, Johnson infused the cause with an urgency that ultimately helped the bill to pass,” says Meacham.
It would take another seven months but the bill eventually became law in June 1964. While it contained some provisions regarding voting, the Civil Rights Act did not end many discriminatory practices that faced African American voters.
A Crossroads in the Story of Civilization
The second factor that Meacham attributes to the passage of the Voting Rights Act is the incident that became known as Bloody Sunday.
On March 7, 1965, hundreds of activists seeking open access to the ballot gathered in Selma, Ala. for a voting rights march that would eventually take them 54 miles to the state capitol steps in Montgomery. Shortly after the march began, mounted county policemen and local whites who had been specially deputized brutally attacked the marchers with nightsticks, teargas, and homemade weapons.
Among the injured was a young activist named John Lewis, who is now a Congressman representing Georgia. He lay on U.S. Highway 80 at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge with a fractured skull, waiting, he recalled later, to die.
“The scene at the bridge became that rarest of things: a crossroads in the long story of civilization,” Meacham says.
That night ABC News interrupted the broadcast premiere of the Oscar-winning movie “Judgment at Nuremburg” with a bulletin about Selma, and showed black-and-white film of the authorities violently assaulting the peaceful marchers.
Meacham says the audience that tuned in for World War II drama may have been feeling a sense of superiority about the American victory over the Nazis and the atrocities they perpetrated.
“Yet those same viewers sitting there that night were confronted in a breaking news report… with images of storm troopers attacking the innocent,” Meacham says. “Not in Europe, not in a distant time, but there and now.”
According to Meacham, the Bloody Sunday news footage that starkly revealed the savagery southern blacks faced helped convert public opinion. In the comfort of their own living rooms, Americans could see and finally understand the harsh realities of life under Jim Crow discrimination that reformers where trying to change.
The Full Johnson Treatment
But President Johnson needed something more before he could go before Congress and the public to issue his call for voting rights legislation.
“He wanted control,” Meacham says.
The situation needed a cooling-off period, so Meacham says Johnson appealed to the two men who could make that happen. First the president wanted Rev. Martin Luther King to get control of the activists gathered in Alabama and delay any further marches. King acceded, but not without taking significant criticism from his followers when he ended a second attempt at a Selma to Montgomery march two days after Bloody Sunday. King led a group that now numbered in the thousands to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, prayed with them, and then turned them around to go back home.
The other man Johnson needed to control was Alabama Gov. George Wallace. The president invited the governor to the White House and gave him what Meacham calls “the full Johnson treatment.”
The 6-foot, 4-inch Texan towered over the smaller Alabaman. Meacham says Johnson cajoled, pleaded, prodded, and threatened Wallace to get him to stop the violence in his state. Finally Johnson appealed to Wallace’s vanity. He asked the governor if he wanted his tombstone to read that Wallace brought prosperity to Alabama, or brought hate to Alabama.
Cowed by Johnson’s arguments, Meacham says Wallace returned to Montgomery and restored order to his state.
“If King appeared to be obeying the law, and if Wallace appeared to be obeying the law, then Johnson would have time to step onto the stage and work his legislative magic,” Meacham says.
“Such evidence of order, in Johnson’s view, would secure moderate support for the seemingly radical move [of] proposing voting rights legislation to the Congress.”
That’s when Johnson, after the eight long days since the Bloody Sunday violence, went to Congress. On the night of Monday, March 15, 1965, the president issued his call:
There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem. And we are met here tonight as Americans–not as Democrats or Republicans-we are met here as Americans to solve that problem…
The Constitution says that no person shall be kept from voting because of his race or his color. We have all sworn an oath before God to support and to defend that Constitution. We must now act in obedience to that oath. Wednesday I will send to Congress a law designed to eliminate illegal barriers to the right to vote…
What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and State of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.
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.
A Duty to Justice
Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law in August 1965. Congress has amended it several times in the years since to strengthen voter protections.
But recent years have brought a number of challenges to the act. According to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, more than 20 states have passed to voting requirements since 2010, many of which may disproportionately affect African Americans.
Then in 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the part of the Voting Rights Act that determines which state and local governments have to seek so-called preclearance before changing their voting procedures. The majority in Shelby County v. Holder said the preclearance formula in the 1965 act was meant to be temporary and had long since grown out of date.
Meacham says he’s troubled by the trend to make casting a ballot harder through tougher laws on voter registration and identification. He contends those measures are contrary to the spirit of the country and he says it will take a skilled and courageous leader like Johnson as well as the work of ordinary Americans to combat them.
“There’s no debate about the fundamental duty to make sure anyone who wants to vote should be able to,” Meacham concludes. “So let’s not fail to discharge that duty, which is a duty to justice, with all our hearts.”
