A Liberal
Dose
December 16,
2021
Troy D.
Smith
“History of
Voting, Part 7: The Civil Rights Era”
Read PART 5
Read PART 6
Last time, we talked about voting rights in the Jim Crow
South and the fact that, via a combination of local laws that circumvented the
15th Amendment and physical violence or intimidation, most African
Americans (and some poor white people) were not allowed to vote in Southern
states. From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, civil rights activists had been
struggling to end segregation, but by the early 1960s they were focusing
heavily on the right to vote. In Mississippi in 1962, only around 6% of
eligible black voters were registered to vote (despite being one-third of the
state’s population). Several civil rights groups came together under the
umbrella of a newly formed coalition, The Council of Federated Organizations
(COFO), to change that. The “federated organizations” in question were the
Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), led by MLK; the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snik”); the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); and the Congress of
Racial Equality (CORE), who had organized the first “freedom rides” in 1947.
COFO embarked on a ten-week project known as “Freedom Summer,”
in which they endeavored to register as many black voters in Mississippi as
possible. The work was done by a combination of local African American
activists and allies, black and white, from around the country. They were
opposed by groups like the White Leagues and the Ku Klux Klan, by many white
locals who may or may not have been affiliated with those organizations (and
who frequently described the civil rights workers as “trash”), and by state and
local government officials. Before the summer was out, over a thousand COFO
volunteers had been arrested, 80 had been beaten, and 30 churches and 37
black-owned homes and businesses had been bombed or burned down.
On June 21, 1964, three young men who were engaged in voter
registration work were arrested by a sheriff’s deputy who was also a Klansman.
They were James Chaney, a local black man, and two young Jewish volunteers from
New York City, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. They were released from
jail after dark, whereupon they were ambushed by Klansmen, abducted, and
murdered. It took weeks to find their bodies; while combing the swamps for
them, searchers found the bodies of 8 other murdered black males, killed
recently.
It is a sad commentary, but a truth, that the murder of two
white students from New York attracted a lot more media attention than the
murders of nine black men from Mississippi. Press coverage of the incidents
drew the country’s attention to the lack of voting rights African Americans
still suffered in the South -and the country was still reeling from the events
of the previous late spring/summer (1963). From May to September of that year,
TV viewers across the country had seen Bull Connor using attack dogs on black
children in Birmingham, Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers was shot dead in
his driveway, and four little girls were killed in a church bombing (also in
Birmingham). People were calling for something to be done.
And the next year, something was: Congress passed, and LBJ
signed into law, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The VRA expanded the federal
government’s ability to enforce the 14th and 15th
amendments. It outlawed literacy tests or any similar methods, and prohibited
state and local governments from passing voting laws that disadvantaged
minorities. It also specified a special status for all states that had allowed
any such disadvantaging techniques in the previous five years (to be revisited
regularly) -which were mostly in the South and West. In such states, no changes
to local or state laws about voting could be made without the approval of the
U.S. attorney general or the U.S. district court in Washington, DC. That last
item protected minorities and greatly expanded their (constitutionally
guaranteed) access to the ballot.
Until a Supreme Court decision in 2013.
--Troy D. Smith,
a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech.
His words do not necessarily represent TTU.
A complete list of Liberal Dose columns can be found HERE
A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE
Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com
No comments:
Post a Comment