Let us march on ballot boxes, march on ballot boxes until race-baiters disappear from the political arena. Let us march on ballot boxes until the salient misdeeds of bloodthirsty mobs will be transformed into the calculated good deeds of orderly citizens.
Let us march on ballot boxes until the Wallaces of our nation tremble away in silence. Let us march on ballot boxes until we send to our city councils, state legislatures, and the United States Congress, men who will not fear to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God.
Let us march on ballot boxes until brotherhood becomes more than a meaningless word in an opening prayer, but the order of the day on every legislative agenda. Let us march on ballot boxes until all over Alabama God's children will be able to walk the earth in decency and honor.
—Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Montgomery, Alabama, March 25, 1965 [1]
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 states that “No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” Its provisions outlaw poll taxes and literacy tests and set up the basis for enforcing equal access to voting. The Act was passed speedily on August 6, 1965, in large part because of the dramatic march from Sema to Montgomery, Alabama in March of 1965.
On February 17, 1965, police in Marion, Alabama murdered Jimmy Lee Jackson, a Black Vietnam veteran, as he attempted to protect his mother who was marching for the right to vote. His death was ignored by the general public, and the horrified community members and visiting activists were inspired to march from the seat of recent voting rights campaigns in Selma to the larger city of Montgomery. To leave Selma, the marchers had to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where they were met by State Public Safety Director Al Lingo’s state troopers, on order from Governor Wallace to stop the marchers. With cameras from national TV news rolling, police drove back the peaceful demonstrators with beatings and teargas, one of the most violent reprisals of its kind, the infamous “Bloody Sunday.”
Andrew Young, former Executive Director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, recalled:
By an extraordinary coincidence, an extremely well-publicized documentary of the World War II war crimes trials, Judgment at Nuremberg, had been scheduled for broadcast on national television on March 7. The film was interrupted several times to interject updates and replays of the violence in Selma, and many viewers apparently mistook these clips for portions of the Nuremberg film. The violence in Selma was so similar to the violence in Nazi Germany that viewers could hardly miss the connection. The news film of the beatings on the Pettus Bridge produced such strong national and worldwide revulsion that prominent people from all over the country, both white and black, dropped whatever they were doing and rushed to Selma to join our demonstrations. Church groups also responded immediately; so did our friends in the labor unions. But most touchingly, many ordinary individuals, whose names we will never know, came down simply out of a personal sense of commitment. [2]
At the time, Reverend King was preaching in Atlanta. Like the others from around the nation, he immediately went to join the marchers. After two weeks of false starts, legal battles for proper federal protection of the marchers, and behind-the-scenes negotiations with the Johnson administration, the marchers set out once more. Led this time by King, along with other movement leaders, such as John Lewis and James Forman, they crossed the Petus Bridge with protection from newly federalized Alabama National Guardsmen. After five days of walking, they reached Montgomery unharmed.
On their arrival the marchers were 25,000 strong, and Reverend King delivered the speech from which I quoted in the epigraph, above, the same speech with these famous lines:
I know you are asking today, "How long will it take?" Somebody's asking, "How long will prejudice blind the visions of men, darken their understanding, and drive bright-eyed wisdom from her sacred throne?" Somebody's asking, "When will wounded justice, lying prostrate on the streets of Selma and Birmingham and communities all over the South, be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men?"
Somebody's asking, "When will the radiant star of hope be plunged against the nocturnal bosom of this lonely night, plucked from weary souls with chains of fear and the manacles of death? How long will justice be crucified, and truth bear it?"
I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because "truth crushed to earth will rise again." How long? Not long, because "no lie can live forever."
And, indeed, it was not long—a mere five months until the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which helped set the United States on a better course towards equality and freedom for African Americans and a better society for all.
The years following the Voting Rights Act are sometimes referred to as the “Second Reconstruction.” As with the first Reconstruction, following the Civil War, the destruction of racist institutions led to social change but was also met with significant resistance. In 1968, the US Civil Rights Commission found that African Americans were
improperly kept off of voting lists, given inadequate or wrong instructions at the polls, had their ballots wrongly disqualified and denied the equal opportunity to vote by absentee ballot. The Commission also found discrimination in the location of polling places and a failure to provide sufficient voting facilities. Racially segregated voter lists and polling places were also found.
The Commission found obstacles to African American political participation at all levels of the electoral process, including redistricting and at-large elections, obstruction of candidates, discriminatory selection of elections officials, and threats of physical and economic harm to politically active African Americans. [3]
Even though life for racial minorities in America has improved in many ways, such exclusionary tactics have not gone away: in the last two decades since the 1980s they have only grown more subtle. According to a recent report, issued jointly by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and People for the American Way, vote suppression in the late 20th and early 21st centuries includes:
• Challenges and threats against individual voters at the polls by armed private guards, off-duty law enforcement officers, local creditors, fake poll monitors, and poll workers and managers.
• Signs posted at the polling place warning of penalties for “voter fraud” or “noncitizen” voting, or illegally urging support for a candidate.
• Poll workers “helping” voters fill out their ballots, and instructing them on how to vote.
• Criminal tampering with voter registration rolls and records.
• Flyers and radio ads containing false information about where, when and how to vote, voter eligibility, and the false threat of penalties.
• Internal memos from party officials in which the explicit goal of suppressing black voter turnout is outlined. [4]
As problems for minority voters have persisted in many parts of the United States, there has been an ongoing conversation about what role the Department of Justice should play in enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. Jeffrey Toobin covered the most recent developments concerning federal enforcement in The New Yorker this fall.
On October 8, 2002 . . . [t]he Attorney General had come forward to launch the Voting Access and Integrity Initiative, whose name refers to the two main traditions in voting-rights law. Voter-access efforts, which have long been associated with Democrats, seek to remove barriers that discourage poor and minority voters; the Voting Rights Act itself is the paradigmatic voter-access policy. The voting-integrity movement, which has traditionally been favored by Republicans, targets fraud in the voting process, from voter registration to voting and ballot counting. Despite the title, Ashcroft’s proposal favored the “integrity” side of the ledger, mainly by assigning a federal prosecutor to watch for election crimes in each judicial district. These lawyers, Ashcroft said, would “deter and detect discrimination, prevent electoral corruption, and bring violators to justice.”
Federal law gives the Justice Department the flexibility to focus on either voter access or voting integrity under the broad heading of voting rights, but such shifts of emphasis may have a profound impact on how votes are cast and counted. In the abstract, no one questions the goal of eliminating voting fraud, but the idea of involving federal prosecutors in election supervision troubles many civil-rights advocates, because few assistant United States attorneys have much familiarity with the laws protecting voter access. That has traditionally been the province of the lawyers in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division, whose role is defined by the Voting Rights Act. In a subtle way, the Ashcroft initiative nudged some of these career civil-rights lawyers toward the sidelines. . . . [5]
In these weeks following the 2004 presidential race, pundits have seen the extremely close election results as evidence of a wide range of divisions in our society. Depending on whom you read, the divide may be between religious and secular, Republican and Democrat, rich and poor, native and immigrant, or white and black. In Montgomery in 1965, speaking after the exhausting weeks of one of the more divisive struggles in the Civil Rights Movement, Reverend King had these words to say, which we would do well to keep close at heart:
Thus, the threat of the free exercise of the ballot by the Negro and the white masses alike resulted in the establishment of a segregated society. They segregated southern money from the poor whites; they segregated southern mores from the rich whites; they segregated southern churches from Christianity; they segregated southern minds from honest thinking; and they segregated the Negro from everything. That's what happened when the Negro and white masses of the South threatened to unite and build a great society: a society of justice where none would pray upon the weakness of others; a society of plenty where greed and poverty would be done away; a society of brotherhood where every man would respect the dignity and worth of human personality.
With thousands who had gathered before him in the name of justice and freedom, it was clear to Reverend King that “we are not about to turn around. . . . We are on the move now.” In his closing, King came back to his refrain: “How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” We have come a great distance on that arc. Let’s keep moving.
Notes
[1] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Our God Is Marching On,” Speech, March 23, 1965. Full text available at:
http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/prestapes/mlk_speech.html
[2] Andrew Young, An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), 358.
[3] Julian Bond and Ralph Neas, The Long Shadow of Jim Crow: Voter Intimidation and Suppression in America Today (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and People for the American Way, 2004), 15-16, http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=16367.
[4] Ibid. 3-4.
[5] Jeffrey Toobin, “Poll Position,” The New Yorker, September 20, 2004, http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/040920fa_fact.
Additional Sources
Lisa Cozzens, "Selma," African American History, May 25, 1998, http://www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhistory/civilrights-55-65/selma.html.
James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1997).
John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., From Slavery To Freedom, Sixth Edition (New York: McGraw Hill, Inc., 1988).
David J. Garrow, Bearing The Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., And The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: Vintage Books, 1986).
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