It happened on
March 7, 1965. That was the date of “Bloody Sunday,” the fateful day when
peaceful protesters who were trying to march from Selma, Alabama, to the state
capital in Montgomery were severely beaten by local and state police. They were
marching primarily for voting rights.
I am embarrassed to
say that I was so absorbed in my own activities that I don’t really remember
hearing about that terrible day at the time. But because of what seems to be a very
questionable move in the U.S. Supreme Court, I have learned about the events in
and around Selma in 3/65 from the news this past week.
For example, the
cover story on the front page of last Thursday’s USA Today was “A Crack in Civil Rights Law?” The crack referred to
is conservative justices questioning Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) that
was first enacted in August 1965, five months after Bloody Sunday.
A similar article
in the 2/27 New York Times reports
how Justice Scalia, the court’s senior member, referred to the provisions of
the VRA being a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.” I have never been a “fan”
of Justice Scalia, but to call a bill that seeks to safeguard voting rights of
all Americans a “racial entitlement” seems particularly asinine to me.
One of the people
who suffered serious injury on Bloody Sunday was John Lewis (b. 1940 in Alabama).
Lewis, who has been the U.S. Representative for Georgia’s 5th
congressional district since 1987, was interviewed by Richard Wolf for the 2/28
issue of USA Today.
Wolf wrote that
Lewis, who “has been marching for voting rights for more than half a century,”
declares that that is not long enough “for the Supreme Court to decide that the
finish line has been reached.” It is not long enough because of lingering
impediments to equal voting rights for some American citizens, especially
people of color.
Lewis, who was in the
student body of American Baptist Theological Seminary (in Nashville, now known
as American Baptist College) in 1961, the year of his graduation, was arrested
40 times from 1960 to 1966. He still bears the scar on his head from being
billy clubbed on Bloody Sunday, a blow so strong he might well have died from
it.
 |
| John Lewis being billy clubbed on March 7, 1965 |
Eight days later,
on March 15, 1965, President Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress,
calling for voter rights legislation. In that speech, he proclaimed, “We shall overcome!”
(That bold statement reportedly touched Martin Luther King, Jr., so deeply that
he wept.) In August, then, the Voter Registration Act was approved by Congress
and signed by the President.
Four times since
then, the VRA has been reaffirmed by Congress—in 1970, 1975, 1982, and again
in 2006, when the Senate voted 98-0 in favor of it. But now Shelby Co. v.
Holder is calling the constitutionality of the VRA into question, and at least
four of the SCOTUS Justices seem to be in favor of declaring it
unconstitutional.
Nevertheless, the
initial zeal for voting rights of the Selma marchers, and the disgraceful
activities of the Alabama law enforcement officers, is not being forgotten. On March
3, Vice-President Biden traveled to Selma to mark the 48th
anniversary of Bloody Sunday. (See a CBS News link here.)
In The Eve of Destruction: How 1965 Transformed
America (2012), American historian James T. Patterson writes that Bloody
Sunday is “a pivotal date in the history of the civil rights movement” (p. 80).
Let’s hope and pray that the SCOTUS won’t gut the VRA and endanger the gains in
voter rights made in the past 48 years.
