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SNCC’s Voter Registration Drives
“By the time the Interstate Commerce Commission began enforcing the ruling mandating equal treatment in interstate travel in November 1961, SNCC was immersed in voter registration efforts in McComb, Mississippi, and a desegregation campaign in Albany, Georgia, known as the Albany Movement.” “Members of [SNCC] first decided to organize in Selma in 1962. Then, it was almost impossible for people of color to register and vote in Alabama. Even though Selma was the Dallas County seat, only 2.1% of voting age African Americans were registered to vote. [SNCC] could attempt to register at the county courthouse only on the first and third Mondays of each month. [Voters wishing to register] had to pass a so-called literacy test, pay a poll tax, and interpret certain sections of the Alabama state constitution. Bernard LaFayette was the first among SNCC staff to lead organizing efforts there, and during one voter registration drive, he was attacked and beaten.”
“In 1963, when Chuck McDew stepped down as SNCC chairman, Lewis was quickly elected to take over. Lewis’ experience at that point was already widely respected–he had been arrested 24 times as a result of his activism.” At the August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, John Lewis, “at the age of 23” and representing SNCC, was not only a keynote speaker, but was also the “youngest speaker at the event”, and helped plan the march. “[In his speech at the march] [h]e intended to criticize John F. Kennedy’s proposed civil rights bill as ‘too little, and too late,’ and to refer to the movement as ‘a serious revolution’. Lewis softened the tone of the delivered speech to appease A. Philip Randolph and other march organizers, but, remained adamant that SNCC had ‘great reservations’ regarding Kennedy’s proposed civil right legislation. He warned his audience: ‘We want our freedom and we want it now’.” (citations omitted)
“After the March on Washington, in 1964, the Civil Rights Act became law. However, this did not make it easier for African Americans to vote in the South.” “In 1964, John Lewis coordinated SNCC efforts to organize voter registration drives and community action programs during the Mississippi Freedom Summer.” “SNCC supported the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in an effort to challenge the legitimacy of the state’s all-white Democratic Party.”
SNCC “had been trying to register voters in Selma since 1963. They hadn’t gotten very far. At the time of the march, only 383 of the 15,000 black residents in Selma’s Dallas County were registered to vote. At 25, Lewis had already been arrested twenty times by white segregationists and badly beaten during Freedom Rides in South Carolina and Montgomery.” “The movement came to a head in the early part of 1965 when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was invited to Selma. He came the first week in January to speak at a mass meeting. Several hundred people came out to the rally…A few weeks later, police ambushed a nighttime march to the courthouse in Marion, Alabama. The streetlights were shot out and the beating began. A young Vietnam War veteran named Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot while trying to protect his mother. He died a few days later. Because of what happened to him, a decision was made to march from Selma to Montgomery.”
“SNCC decided not to participate in the march because they felt Dr. King’s presence might overshadow the years of organizing and protest they had invested in voting rights in Selma. But [Lewis] was determined to march and [he] told [SNCC], ‘If the people want to march, I’m going to march with them.’ [SNCC] said [that he] could march as an individual, but not as the chairman of SNCC. That was fine with [him].”
Bloody Sunday
“SNCC decided not to participate in the march because they felt Dr. King’s presence might overshadow the years of organizing and protest they had invested in voting rights in Selma. But [Lewis] was determined to march and [he] told [SNCC], ‘If the people want to march, I’m going to march with them.’ [SNCC] said [that he] could march as an individual, but not as the chairman of SNCC. That was fine with [him]. On March 6, several of [SNCC’s members] drove from SNCC headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, to Selma, carrying [their] sleeping bags. [They] arrived at the SNCC Freedom House in Selma where we could stay and sleep.
Meanwhile, at Dr. King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Andy Young, James Bevel, and Hosea Williams drew straws to determine who would represent the organization in the march. The one who drew the shortest straw would be the leader. Hosea pulled the shortest one, so he led the march on behalf of SCLC. The leaders of SCLC asked [Lewis] to lead with Hosea.”
“On March 7, 1965, John Lewis threw an apple, an orange, a toothbrush, some toothpaste and two books into his backpack, and prepared to lead a fifty-four-mile march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.” “On an overcast Sunday afternoon, Lewis and Hosea Williams, a top aide to Martin Luther King Jr., led some 600 local residents marching in two single-file lines. The streets of downtown Selma were eerily quiet… Lewis thought he would be arrested, but he had no idea that the ensuing events would dramatically alter the arc of American history.
As they crossed the Alabama River on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, Alabama state troopers descended on the marchers with batons and bullwhips; some demonstrators were trampled by policemen on horseback, and the air was choked with tear gas. Lewis, who suffered a fractured skull from a clubbing, thought he was going to die. That evening, the prime-time network news played extensive footage of what came to be known as ‘Bloody Sunday.”
The Selma-to-Montgomery March and the Voting Rights Act
Because of Bloody Sunday, “Dr. King made an appeal for all religious leaders to come to Selma to participate in a march. Movement lawyers of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund went to court, assisted by Assistant Attorney General John Doar. We appeared before federal judge Frank M. Johnson in Alabama and got a federal order to march from Selma to Montgomery.
On March 15th, only seven days after Bloody Sunday, President Lyndon Johnson spoke to Congress and delivered one of the most meaningful and powerful speeches any modern president has made on civil and voting rights. In that speech he used the theme song of the movement, saying, ‘And we shall overcome.’
Finally, on March 21, Dr. King led a march of thousands from Selma to Montgomery. Since Governor George Wallace could not assure [their] protection, President Johnson commanded the National Guard to ensure [their] safety on the road. [They] arrived in Montgomery on March 25.”
“Eight days [after Bloody Sunday], President Lyndon Johnson introduced the Voting Rights Act before a joint session of Congress. ‘It is wrong—deadly wrong—to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country,’ Johnson said. On August 6, 1965, a hundred years after the end of the Civil War, the VRA became law.”
John Lewis’ Activism & Public Service post-Voting Rights Act
“Despite more than 40 arrests, physical attacks and serious injuries, John Lewis remained a devoted advocate of the philosophy of nonviolence. After leaving SNCC in 1966, he continued his commitment to the Civil Rights Movement as Associate Director of the Field Foundation and his participation in the Southern Regional Council’s voter registration programs.” “
“Lewis became head of the Voter Education Project [VEP] in 1970, which took the lead in registering black voters in the South after the VRA’s passage. The VEP registered 2 million voters from 1970 to 1977, including Lewis’s mother and father. The group distributed posters that read: ‘Hands that pick [sic] cotton…can now pick our elected officials.’” (emphasis added) “Under his leadership, the VEP transformed the nation’s political climate by adding nearly four million minorities to the voter rolls.” “In 1977, John Lewis was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to direct more than 250,000 volunteers of ACTION, the federal volunteer agency.”
“In 1981, Lewis was elected to his first official government office as an Atlanta City Council member.” “While serving on the Council, he was an advocate for ethics in government and neighborhood preservation.” “He was elected to Congress in November 1986 and has served as U.S. Representative of Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District since then. He is Senior Chief Deputy Whip for the Democratic Party in leadership in the House, a member of the House Ways & Means Committee, a member of its Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support, and Ranking Member of its Subcommittee on Oversight.”
“Lewis…viewed Obama’s election as a culmination of what he and so many others had put their lives on the line for. ‘Because of what you did, Barack Obama is the president of the United States,’ Lewis said in Selma following Obama’s 2008 victory, on the forty-fourth anniversary of Bloody Sunday.
Lewis knew the president would be attacked because of his race, but the full-scale assault on voting rights that followed the 2010 midterm elections caught him and other movement veterans off-guard.”
“In July 2011, when few were paying attention to the issue, Lewis delivered an impassioned speech on the House floor about the right to vote. ‘Voting rights are under attack in America,’ Lewis told the nearly empty chamber in his deep baritone. ‘There’s a deliberate and systematic attempt to prevent millions of elderly voters, young voters, students, minority and low-income voters from exercising their constitutional right to engage in the democratic process.’ He called voter-ID laws a poll tax—a year before Attorney General Holder would make the same comparison—and recalled how, before passage of the VRA, blacks who attempted to register in the South were required to guess the number of bubbles in a bar of soap or the number of jellybeans in a jar. ‘We must not step backward to another dark period in our history,’ Lewis warned. ‘The vote is the most powerful nonviolent tool we have in a democratic society.’ To combat voter suppression, Lewis sponsored the Voter Empowerment Act, which would add millions of voters to the rolls and increase turnout by modernizing registration, mandating early voting and adopting Election Day registration.”
“[In 2012], Lewis found out that his great-great-grandfather had registered and voted after becoming an emancipated slave following the Civil War, during Reconstruction—something that Lewis could not do until 100 years later, after the passage of the VRA. He wept when he heard the news. It underscored how delicate the right to vote has been throughout American history. If the Court [had upheld] Section 5, as it [had] in [the] four prior opinions, Lewis’s legacy [would have been] cemented…[Since] the Court eviscerate[d] it, Lewis’s voice [is] needed as never before.”
“On the last night of the 2012 Democratic National Convention, which took place just twenty-five miles from where Lewis was beaten
as a Freedom Rider in Rock Hill, South Carolina, he implored the faithful to “march to the polls like never, ever before.” By that time, civil rights activists, the Obama administration and the judiciary had heeded his warning on voting rights, as ten major restrictive laws were blocked in court under the VRA and federal and state protections. ‘The election of 2012,’ Lewis said on MSNBC, ‘dramatized…the need for Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.’… The successful resistance to voter suppression may be the most important story of the 2012 election. Compared with 2008, 1.7 million more blacks, 1.4 million more Hispanics and 550,000 more Asians went to the polls, versus 2 million fewer whites. The turnout rate among black voters exceeded that of whites for the first time on record, according to the Census Bureau. While the turnout rate fell among nearly every demographic group, the largest increase came from blacks 65 and over. Those, like Lewis, who had lived through the days when merely trying to register could get you killed were the people most determined to defend their rights last year.”
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