Blooding Sunday

56 years later and the battle for the right to vote isn't over

Alabama police beat and teargas protesters on March 7, 1965

It was a Sunday like any other in the state of Alabama on March 7, 1965, which is to say it was a Sunday when Black citizens of the state did not enjoy the same right to vote as white citizens.  On that date a group of about 600 people set out from Selma, Alabama to march to the state capital in Montgomery in protest against restrictions on the rights of Black citizens to vote. 

The march was organized and led by John Lewis, of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Reverend Hosea Williams of the Southern Leadership Christian Conference.  Governor George Wallace, who had famously invoked the phrase, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” upon his election in 1963, said the day before, “there will be no march between Selma and Montgomery.” He ordered the commander of the Alabama Highway Patrol to “use whatever measures are necessary to prevent a march.”

When the marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge leading into Montgomery, they were met by a wall of helmeted state troopers and sheriff’s deputies, some of whom were on horseback.  As the marchers proceeded along the road known as the Jefferson Davis Highway, named after the president of the Confederacy, they were beaten with billy clubs, ridden down by armed police on horseback, and teargassed. 

The attack by police on peaceful marchers was filmed by news crews and appeared on televisions across the country the next day.  Photographs of a bloodied John Lewis being beaten by a club-wielding highway patrolman appeared on newspaper front pages.  President Lyndon Johnson issued a statement from the White House “deploring the brutality with which a number of Negro citizens of Alabama were treated” and promised to send a voting rights bill to congress, which he did a week later.  He convened a joint session of congress and gave an address that was carried on national TV.  He called the Selma march “a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom” and invoked the words of Martin Luther King Jr. when he said, “it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”

Two weeks later, on March 21, about 8,000 people assembled in Selma for another march to the state capital in Montgomery.  Led by Martin Luther King and several other religious leaders, the march was protected by the Alabama National Guard, which had been federalized by President Johnson.  The marchers had been reduced in number by the order of a federal judge and spent March 22 and 23 crossing Lowndes County, which at that time was 81 percent Black and 19 percent white, with not a single Black resident allowed to register to vote.

On March 25, the protest passed into Montgomery and approached the state Capitol with a petition for Wallace.  They were met at the Capitol door by a line of state troopers who refused them entrance and told them the governor was not there.  They remained until a secretary for Wallace came to the door and accepted the petition.

The Voting Rights Act was passed that summer and signed into law on August 6, 1965 almost five months to the day after Bloody Sunday at the Edmund Pettus Bridge.  The act was written to enforce the right to vote granted under the 14th and 15th Amendments, and specifically secured the rights of minorities to vote, with several provisions that applied directly to states like Alabama that had a history of denying Blacks the right to vote.  It also had a more general application to every state, prohibiting the passage of any law that discriminates against minorities by race or language.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, secured with the blood of civil rights protesters at the Edmund Pettus Bridge and elsewhere around the south, was eviscerated in a 5 to 4 vote by the Supreme Court in 2013 in the case of Shelby County v. Holder, which was designed to invalidate the section of the act which required all the states of the former Confederacy and several others to “pre-clear” with the Department of Justice changes to their voting laws. 

Now a new case, argued before the court only this week, threatens to invalidate the last remaining enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act under its Section 2, which prohibits laws which discriminate on the basis of race passed by any state.  Observers of the court speculated after the arguments on Tuesday that the court will uphold the Arizona laws that prohibit voting on Sundays, long a traditional time for Black voters to go to vote in states which allow early voting, and prohibit collection of absentee ballots for delivery to polling places by community activists, another long-time tradition among Black voting rights groups.

Conservative activists and the Republican Party have been chipping away at the Voting Rights Act of 1965 practically since the day it was passed.  Now it appears that the cornerstone of the civil rights laws in this country, which guarantees the rights of everyone to vote, will be further weakened by a Supreme Court packed with right-wing justices by Republican presidents.

President Joe Biden marked the anniversary of Bloody Sunday by issuing a modest executive order intended to expand access to voting and called on congress to enact House Resolution 1, which was passed by the House on Wednesday on a largely party line vote.  The bill, which faces a grim future in the Senate because of Republican opposition, would expand access to voting and restrict partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts.

The Republican Party has come to the conclusion that the only way they can win is by making it more difficult for Democrats to vote, and the Democrats they seek to target with all of their laws on voter IDs and other restrictive measures are Black and Brown Americans.

Fifty-six years after blood was shed on the Edmund Pettus Bridge for the right to vote, the fight is still on.