From Selma to Montgomery by Barbara Harris Combs

Author:Barbara Harris Combs [Combs, Barbara Harris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, 20th Century, State & Local, South (AL; AR; FL; GA; KY; LA; MS; NC; SC; TN; VA; WV), General
ISBN: 9781136173769
Google: WgQ3AgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-11-26T01:21:13+00:00

In fact, “President Lyndon B. Johnson told his Attorney General, Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, to draft the ‘goddamnest toughest’ voting bill he could write, which Katzenbach proceeded to do.”5 President Johnson was enraged over the events of Bloody Sunday, and especially the killing of Unitarian Universalist minister James Reeb, which the President had termed “an American tragedy.”

The preceding chapter discusses the significance of individuals on the diffusion of an innovation; however, the successful adaptation of an idea by the larger society is a social process that operates at the system level. When trusted opinion leaders adopt positive attitudes about the adaptation, it exerts a social pressure on the members of the system to adopt the idea too.6 The social system will follow its trusted opinion leaders. Following Bloody Sunday, the voting rights struggle, which had been marked for over 100 years by a series of minor successes and vast retreats, reached a threshold or “critical mass.” Rogers defines the critical mass as “a kind of tipping point, or social threshold in the diffusion process” when the idea (innovation) catches and spreads.7 On March 15, 1965, when the opinion leader of the free world, President Lyndon Baines Johnson, took a stand on protection for the minority franchise in his nationally televised address before Congress entitled “The American Promise,” he created such a tipping point, and the events of Bloody Sunday were the catalyst.

The events on the Edmund Pettus Bridge acted like a contagion, and support for the social innovation quickly spread. Bloody Sunday, America's call to action in the long march to freedom, occurred on March 7, 1965. Turnaround Tuesday happened on March 9, 1965; James Reeb was assaulted that evening. Two days later, on March 11, 1965, Reeb died of injuries he sustained in his attack. The evening of March 15, 1965, President Johnson delivered his address to Congress. President Johnson said:

Many of the issues of civil rights are very complex and most difficult. But about this there can and should be no argument. Every American citizen must have an equal right to vote…. There is no duty which weighs more heavily on us than the duty we have to ensure that right.8

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