The Fierce Urgency of Now by Julian E. Zelizer

Author:Julian E. Zelizer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-01-07T16:00:00+00:00

ENSURING THE RIGHT TO VOTE

The dramatic passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had given civil rights leaders greater clout in Congress, and the liberal gains in the 1964 election, in which approximately 94 percent of registered African Americans voted for Johnson, had demonstrated that the movement could deliver votes. The activists were energized by their triumphs, and they pushed for a new civil rights bill that would give the federal government greater authority to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment, which made it illegal to deny anyone the right to vote based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

After Reconstruction, the federal government did nothing to counteract the malicious effects of literacy tests, residency tests, and poll taxes that southern states passed to make voting extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, for African Americans—and poor whites too, unless they were exempted by grandfather clauses. The number of African Americans registered to vote in southern states, where the great majority of the African American population lived, remained small throughout the first half of the twentieth century. A mere 3 percent of the five million eligible southern African Americans were registered to vote when World War II began. For almost ninety years, Congress did little to rectify the situation. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 had been so watered down that it relied on local juries, on which only whites could serve, to enforce the voting rights of African Americans in the South. The civil rights legislation of 1960 granted local judges more power to register voters, but they were generally white segregationists who did little or nothing to expand the franchise.

There had been some progress by the early 1960s, but it owed little to Congress. A coalition of civil rights organizations that included SNCC, SCLC, CORE, and the NAACP had established the Voter Registration Project, which provided money to grassroots activists who worked frenetically in southern states to help African Americans circumvent Jim Crow barriers and get registered. In 1964, there had been a higher turnout of African American voters in the South than in any previous presidential election, although almost 57 percent of the African American population there were still not registered to vote.

The Supreme Court was also influential. Under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Court made a series of important rulings between 1962 and 1964 that established the one-man-one-vote rule for state and federal legislative elections. For decades, state legislatures had avoided redrawing voting district lines for U.S. House and state legislature seats, even though rural districts generally had declining or stagnant populations and urban districts were experiencing huge population growth. Many of the urban districts had heavy concentrations of African Americans and young liberal whites, while the rural districts were often all white and politically conservative. In their decisions, the Supreme Court required states to redraw legislative districts so that every voter had equal representation in legislatures.

But the Court rulings and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were not enough. Registration rates for African Americans in the Deep South remained extremely low.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.