something POSITIVE happened. Think of the following
Doug Wilder, Governor of Virginia.
Congressmen Bobby Scott, Artur Davis, Mike Espy, Mel Watts, Barbara Jordan, Mickey Leland, Andrew Young, John Lewis, Bennie Thompson, Sheila Jackson-Lee . . . just to name a few.
Think of Barack Obama winning NC, FL and VA
Think of Jim Clyburn of SC as Majority Whip of the US House
Absent what happened 44 years ago today, it is quite possible none of these would have happened.
44 year ago today President Lyndon Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act
We tend to forget how much changed in this country during the 5+ years Johnson served as President. Yes, he inherited some good will because of the martyrdom of his predecessor in Dallas. But Johnson also knew how to work the Congress, most particularly the Senate, of which he had clearly been the master during his time as Majority Leader from 1953 until he became Vice President in 1961. During his tenure as Presidency we saw not only the programs of the Great Society, including (GASP) government run health care (in Medicare and Medicaid), we also saw the Federal government commit to a broader sense of equity - think of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act, for example.
In some ways the Voting Rights Act was the most important to changing the politics and thus the future of our country. One can find the following on the website of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department:
Soon after passage of the Voting Rights Act, federal examiners were conducting voter registration, and black voter registration began a sharp increase. The cumulative effect of the Supreme Court's decisions, Congress' enactment of voting rights legislation, and the ongoing efforts of concerned private citizens and the Department of Justice, has been to restore the right to vote guaranteed by the 14th and 15th Amendments. The Voting Rights Act itself has been called the single most effective piece of civil rights legislation ever passed by Congress.
Let me repeat that last sentence: The Voting Rights Act itself has been called the single most effective piece of civil rights legislation ever passed by Congress.
And Section 5, the preclearance portion of the act, applied not only across the states of the old Confederacy, but also to some counties in the North, especially three of the Boroughs of New York City: Bronx, Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Frederick Douglass had called he 15th Amendment "our Jubilee" because he believed without full voting participation Africa-Americans would never be completely free. In the period after the end of Reconstruction as a result of the bargain that settled the disputed presidential election of 1876, black participation in voting in the South basically disappeared. Literacy tests were used to disqualify possible black voters (with whites exempted by Grandfather clauses - if you were descended from someone who had voted before 1868, the date the 14th Amendment said that all born in the US were citizens, you would be exempt from literacy tests) and by Poll Taxes, which were a way of excluded poor people which in the economic, political, and social climate of the post-Reconstruction period fell disproportionally on those with black skinsw.
The 15th Amendment, as well as its predecessor, the 14th, had the following statement at its end:
The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
One can argue that until the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act Congress had never fully exercised this power. And the enforcement power given the US Department of Justice is what finally began to open up the political process to Southern African-Americans - and those in certain places in the North, such as New York City.
Any date in history has many important occasions to commemorate. On Barack Obama's birthday, we could also have commemorated Louis Armstrong and Helen Thomas (as the President himself did). Today's birthdays include such notables as poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, discoverer of penicillin Sir Alexander Fleming, peace activist Scott Nearing and artist Andy Warhol; deaths include President Wilson's first wife Ellen, actor Cedrick Hardwicke who once played Captain Hook ( people of my generation may remember as Captain Hook in the televised showings of Peter Pan with Mary Martin that was wrong, h/t stevenwag), and newscaster Harry Reasoner; in 1990 the Security Council voted 13-0 to impost sanctions on Iraq for its invasion of Kuwait (thereby starting the process that would lead to the Gulf War), in 1890 Cy Young won the first of his more than 500 victories . . . and of course there is an important event two decades before the voting rights act, the Hiroshima bomb.
No date commemorates only the things that sadden or shame us, nor those that elevate us. We choose how to interpret the past.
It is appropriate to remember Hiroshima, and in three days Nagasaki. I chose to remember the inauguration of the nuclear age, the Trinity Test at Alamogordo of July 16, 1945, in this diary. As I write this, there are several diaries reminding us of this day in 1945. That is appropriate.
Still, it is also important to remember 1965, the law signed by Lyndon Johnson. When he had signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, Johnson supposedly told an aide We have lost the South for a generation. Yet despite that, he moved ahead with the Voting Rights Act. Perhaps the events at the Edmund Pettis Bridge, where on the march from Selma to Montgomery to engender support for a voting rights act now Congressman John Lewis had his skull bashed in helped move this bill forward. Certainly the video of that clash, with the marchers kneeling to pray but before they could finish being trampled by Alabama law enforcement on horseback and on foot, shocked people, the way the images of fire hoses and dogs helped propel the 1964 Civil Rights Act, or the peaceful march of a quarter million people August 28, 1963. Images do affect us, they do affect the national mood, they can therefore help shape our political future.
Let John Lewis recount the events of that day, and more:
Lewis talks about Johnson's speech on the Voting Rights Act - here is a clip of the conclusion of that speech:
Today is the 44th anniversary of the culmination of that march, the signing into law of the Voting Rights Act.
Let us never forget.
Peace.