Читать книгу Freedom Facts and Firsts - Jessie Carney Smith - Страница 104

In an attempt to bring the flagrant system of racial discrimination to the attention of the American nation, in 1965 leaders from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) targeted Selma, Alabama, to focus on the disenfranchisement of black voters. This was not the first time that black activists worked to gain access to the voting booth for blacks in Dallas County, Alabama. Between the 1920s and the 1940s, members of the Dallas County Voters League, in spite of resolute white resistance, struggled to register black voters.

In early 1965, the quest to gain the right of the ballot for blacks intensified on February 18, when during a peaceful march in Marion, Alabama, state troopers attacked peaceful demonstrators and shot Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was protecting his mother from the billy club blows of the troopers. Jackson’s death eight days later galvanized the protesters’ resolve to bring national awareness to the need for a federal voter registration law. On March 7, 1965, approximately 600 marchers, led by John Lewis of the SNCC and Hosea Williams of the SCLC, walked from Browns Chapel to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, demonstrating for voter rights and remembering Jackson’s ultimate sacrifice. Once they reached the bridge, the violence of “Bloody Sunday” erupted in full view of photographers and journalists, as armed state troopers and deputies led by Major John Cloud and Sheriff Jim Clark brutally battered the protesters. The televised events of Bloody Sunday triggered national outrage and the White House was inundated with calls and telegrams. Later, Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders decided to hold other marches. The second attempt was held on March 9, when King led the marchers despite Federal Court Judge Frank M. Johnson’s restraining order against the journey to Montgomery. Just like the March 7 protest, state troopers again met the assembly of demonstrators head on. Rather than confront the awaiting state troops, King led the assemblage of protesters in prayer and led them back to Selma. However, the day did not pass without violence, as a group of white vigilantes beat the Reverend James Reeb, a white Unitarian minister, who died two days later.

Demonstrators in Harlem, New York, show their support of the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965 (Library of Congress).

Under the protection of the court and a federalized National Guard, a third march from Selma to Montgomery was held on March 21. Four days later, approximately 25,000 protesters arrived at the state capitol in Montgomery, and King delivered a victory speech. Again, however, death invaded the ranks of the civil rights workers when the Ku Klux Klan killed Viola Liuzzo, a white woman from Detroit, Michigan, in Lowndes County, Alabama. Nevertheless, the efforts of the civil rights organizations achieved their desired goal. On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law. This act not only protects the rights of voter registration workers, it also proscribes discriminatory election measures that include land ownership as a prerequisite for voting, poll taxes, and literacy tests constructed to disenfranchise American black voters. Just as the mass demonstrations in Montgomery led to the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, and Birmingham served as the impetus for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the mass protest march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 1996 the U.S. Congress, under the National Trail Systems Act of 1968, created the Selma-to-Montgomery Trail.

Linda T. Wynn