The Struggle for Civil RightsFrom the earliest colonial days, American history has been haunted by the specter of African slavery. Even after its legal abolition in 1865 America's "original sin," as James Madison first called it, lived on through a deeply entrenched system of legal, social, and economic discrimination against African Americans. (Madison, 1820)(Click button for citation) The movement to overturn that systemic discrimination has been ongoing for more than 150 years. The most blatant form of racial discrimination—the system of de jure segregation enacted in the South, which legally required the discriminatory treatment of African Americans—was essentially abolished by federal legislation, including the Voting Rights Act, in the 1960s. But the problem of de facto segregation has long been a fact of life not only in the South but throughout the nation.It continued—in the segregated schools of cities such as Boston, and the segregated housing markets of cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles—long after the legal and political battles of the modern Civil Rights Movement had ended. While African Americans, as a group, have made significant gains in income and educational attainment over the last 50 years, de facto segregation continues to affect many aspects of American life. (U.S. Census Bureau, 2012; National Center for Education Statistics, 2012)In this theme, we will focus on the modern Civil Rights Movement, looking at efforts to affirm and expand African-American rights in two specific areas that have been central to the overall civil rights struggle: voting and public education. The fight to end the disenfranchisement of African-American voters and secure their right to vote, free from intimidation and legal obstruction, culminated with the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The struggle to desegregate public schools and win equal educational opportunities for African-American children—first affirmed in the landmark Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education (1954)—has continued for generations. In this theme, we will look specifically at the tumultuous and emotionally charged effort to desegregate Boston's public schools in the mid-1970s.We will use these two case studies to examine the historical concept of contingency and to learn how to use historical evidence to draw conclusions about the impact of historical events on American society, through the process of historical analysis.The Early Struggle for Civil RightsThe end of the Civil War brought the legal abolition of slavery by the Thirteenth Amendment, the first of the three so-called Civil War Amendments. But the end of slavery did not bring equality for the former slaves.While the southern states had to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment as a condition of their readmission to the Union, most of them quickly enacted laws to close off opportunities to the newly freed slaves and deny them the rights of citizenship. The postwar Black Codes—based on older southern laws that sought to limit the freedoms of freed blacks in the years before the Civil War—barred African Americans from voting, denied them most legal rights, and restricted their ability to find work outside of plantations. Such laws laid the groundwork for the later Jim Crow laws, which institutionalized segregation in all walks of life throughout the South. (Dunning, 1907)The house in Atlanta where Martin Luther King Jr. was born is now part of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site. Click on the image above to go to the National Park Service's "Historic Places of the Civil Rights Movement" website. (Click button for citation) In response to the Black Codes, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which formally made African Americans citizens. To further safeguard the citizenship rights of the freed slaves, Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment, which was ratified in 1868. The Reconstruction Acts, passed in 1867 and 1868, essentially placed the southern states under military rule for a decade, allowing for a brief period in which freed African Americans in the South enjoyed political rights.The profound significance of the Fourteenth Amendment was that, through its Equal Protection and Due Process clauses, it prohibited the states from abridging the rights and liberties guaranteed to all citizens under the Constitution. In reality, however, for African Americans through the end of the 19th century (and well beyond), the promise of equal protection and due process went unrealized. The southern states flouted the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Supreme Court refused to interpret it as making the Bill of Rights binding on the states. (Foner, 1988)The Black Codes also led Congress to pass the Fifteenth Amendment (ratified in 1870), which guaranteed African Americans the right to vote. It did so by decreeing that citizens' right to vote could not be denied or abridged based on race, color, or prior slave status. Despite the Fifteenth Amendment, southern states continued to deprive blacks of their voting rights by imposing voter-qualification restrictions (e.g., literacy tests and property-ownership requirements) that effectively disenfranchised African Americans. (Valelly, 2009)The Fifteenth Amendment divided the pioneering women's rights movement, which sought the franchise for women as well as for African Americans. As we saw in Theme: Communicating Historical Ideas, some leaders in the nascent woman suffrage movement opposed ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment because it did not also extend the voting right to women. Women did not gain the right to vote until ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.Jim Crow Laws and the Segregated SouthUnyielding southern resistance to black equality led Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which prohibited racial segregation in public accommodations such as hotels, restaurants, and transportation. It also barred the exclusion of African Americans from jury service. But when the federal government ended its military occupation of the South in 1877, marking the end of Reconstruction, the southern states further defied federal efforts to guarantee the civil rights of blacks. (Foner, 1988)"Colored" water cooler in streetcar terminal, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, 1939. (Click button for citation) Southern state legislatures enacted Jim Crow laws, which discriminated against African Americans by requiring racial segregation of schools, restaurants, hotels, theaters, and other public accommodations. Under Jim Crow laws, the southern states created separate facilities for whites and blacks in every walk of life, covering all public accommodations. This institutionalization of race-based separation throughout the South, which endured for a hundred years after the Civil War, was known as de jure segregation because it was backed by law.After Reconstruction, African Americans throughout the South faced state legal systems that denied them equal justice and routinely violated their due-process rights. The courts and law enforcement in the South abided lynching and other white mob violence committed against blacks. And the federal courts, well into the 1900s, proved unwilling or unable to uphold the civil rights of blacks. (Equal Justice Initiative, 2015)Disenfranchisement Despite the Fifteenth AmendmentAfter Reconstruction, the southern states devised obstacles to block African Americans from voting despite the Fifteenth Amendment, which decreed that the right to vote could not be denied on the basis of race or color. To circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment's intent, southern states employed devices for determining voter eligibility which, though not expressly racial, had the particular effect of disenfranchising blacks, who were overwhelmingly poor and uneducated.A poll tax receipt. Image courtesy of the African American Intellectual History Society.These devices included literacy tests, poll taxes (a tax paid as a qualification for voting), and property-ownership requirements. Many states in the South also imposed a so-called grandfather clause, which restricted voting to those whose grandfathers had voted before Reconstruction (i.e., pre 1867). Grandfather clauses effectively denied the descendants of slaves the right to vote. (Valelly, 2009) All of these legally enacted devices represented forms of de jure segregation—as opposed to de facto segregation, which lacked the force of law.Black disenfranchisement continued in one form or another throughout the South for a century after the Civil War.Separate but EqualLegal segregation in the South was validated by the Supreme Court in a landmark decision at the close of the 1800s. Homer Plessy, an African American, defied a Louisiana segregation law by riding in a "whites only" railroad car. He was arrested when he refused to move to a car reserved for blacks as mandated by the state law. Plessy challenged the constitutionality of the law on the grounds that segregation violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.The Supreme Court rejected this challenge, ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) that state laws requiring racial segregation in public facilities are constitutional if the facilities are "separate but equal." The Court's decision ignored the fact that most facilities available to African Americans were not equal but vastly inferior; nonetheless, Plessy and the doctrine of "separate but equal" remained the law of the land for more than half a century. (Medley, 2003)Week 5 Short ResponsesDeveloping a Thesis, Step 1The Civil Rights Movement touched on many different aspects of American life: politics, religion, economics, culture, and the law, to name just a few. In this learning block, we're going to ask you to develop an informed point of view about one aspect of the Civil Rights Movement.You've already had some experience in developing a thesis statement for your writing plan. In this learning block, we're going to take that process one step further, showing you how to refine your thesis into a sharper, more strongly worded statement that expresses a clear point of view.The first step: develop a research question about the Civil Rights Movement, based on the material contained in this learning block. You should use a specific historical lens that you feel is relevant to this issue. Historical lenses can include such perspectives as political, social, religious, military, and economic history. Be sure to respond to each question in 1-2 complete sentences, using proper grammar.To refresh your memory about historical lenses, you can return to Theme: Approaches to History, Learning Block 1-2, Page 2.Theme: Analyzing History | Learning Block 5-1 | Page 2 of 3The Struggle for Civil Rights, 1900 – 1950The first half of the 20th century saw limited progress in the fight to secure the civil rights of African Americans. Booker T. Washington, president of the Tuskegee Institute and the leading figure in the African-American community in the early 1900s, was an outspoken proponent of black education and entrepreneurship. But Washington was criticized within the African-American community for his strategic decision not to challenge Jim Crow laws and the disenfranchisement of black voters directly.W.E.B. Du Bois, 1918. (Click button for citation) More militant African-American leaders, including W.E.B. DuBois and Ida Wells, founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, with the mission of actively fighting against racial prejudice. The organization focused in its early years largely on efforts to prevent lynchings in the South and on mounting legal challenges to Jim Crow legislation. (Finch, 1981)The return of thousands of African-American veterans of World War I highlighted the huge divide between America's rhetorical commitment to democracy and individual freedom and the reality of segregation, disenfranchisement, and anti-black violence in the South. This gave rise to the New Negro movement, which sparked the larger cultural and intellectual movement known as the Harlem Renaissance (Gates, H.L., 1988)The Lafayette Theatre, Harlem, 1936. (Click button for citation) Beginning shortly before World War I, the Great Migration saw an estimated six million African Americans move from the deep South to the North, Midwest, and West over the next 60 years. Fleeing segregation and poverty, many of these African Americans found work in industrial cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and Gary, Indiana. While many African Americans had previously been suspicious of organized labor, A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, became the leading voice for black workers within the labor movement. As the number of African Americans working in industrial jobs swelled, organized labor became increasingly outspoken in its advocacy for black workers' rights; in the 1950s and 1960s, labor would be a powerful ally of the civil rights movement. (Lemann, 1992)The Great Depression of the 1930s hit African Americans disproportionally hard; the collapse of cotton prices drove thousands of Southern sharecroppers to the brink (Thompson and Clarke, 1935), and the scarcity of factory jobs led to increased racial tensions in Northern industrial cities. The unemployment rate among African Americans was estimated to exceed 50 percent—more than twice the rate among whites. (Wolters, 1970)African Americans, traditionally supporters of the Republican Party because of its historical opposition to slavery, were initially skeptical of Democrat Franklin Roosevelt, who had won the Presidency with strong backing from the South. Early New Deal programs were not aimed toward the African-American community, and some, such as the Federal Housing Authority, initially reinforced existing patterns of segregation. But other programs, such as the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps, provided jobs to substantial numbers of African Americans, especially in the North. By the end of the decade, many African Americans in the North were strongly behind the New Deal, and urban black voters began a major shift that would eventually make them an integral part of the Democratic electoral coalition. (Reed, 2008)America's entry into World War II effectively ended the Depression, as factories geared up for the war effort. At the same, time, more than a million African Americans joined the armed forces; when they returned from war in 1945, they embodied the argument that African Americans were entitled to the same freedoms for which America had fought in Europe and the Pacific. (Taylor, 2014)While resistance to the campaign for African-American civil rights was still deeply entrenched, the late 1940s saw a couple of notable victories: Jackie Robinson famously broke baseball's "Color Line" in 1947, and in 1948, President Harry S Truman issued an executive order that desegregated the U.S. military. While these breakthroughs were largely symbolic, more substantive gains were just over the horizon.Week 5 Short ResponsesDeveloping a Thesis, Step 2The second step in developing your thesis statement—which is really just another way of saying, your point of view on this issue—is to do some research into the historical evidence. To refresh your memory about historical evidence, click on this link to return to Theme: Approaches to History, Learning Block 2-2, Page 3, where you can review the graphic about primary and secondary sources. You can also use the material contained in this learning block to give you some ideas about where to conduct your research. Be sure to respond to each question in 1-2 complete sentences, using proper grammar.Theme: Analyzing History | Learning Block 5-1 | Page 3 of 3The Modern Civil Rights Movement, 1954 – 1968The NAACP's strategy of mounting legal challenges to Jim Crow laws had produced minor gains in the first decades of the 20th century. In 1938, the Supreme Court sided with the NAACP in ruling that states that provide a law school for whites had to provide in-state legal education to African Americans as well. And in 1944, the Court struck down the "white primary" system that effectively barred African Americans from voting in Democratic primaries in the South.Thurgood Marshall, NAACP's chief counsel, who argued the case before the Supreme Court for the plaintiffs. (Click button for citation) The greatest victory, however, came in a case involving public elementary and secondary schools. In Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal"—overturning Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and ushering in an intense period of activism that would, within a generation, tear down the facade of legal segregation. (Cottrol et al, 2004)Because of the magnitude of the Brown decision, many scholars consider 1954 to mark the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement. During the roughly 15 years following Brown, a wide range of African-American leaders and organizations sought to galvanize American public opinion—and, as a result, political will—against the structures of de jure segregation in the South: segregated schools, "whites only" lunch counters and restrooms, and separate "colored" sections on public buses, to name only a few.The movement's tools were civil disobedience and nonviolent protests, including boycotts, sit-ins, and protest marches. Very often, nonviolent civil rights protesters met with violence at the hands of Southern law enforcement officers and civilians; some of these confrontations were covered on the network television news, and the images of police brutally beating peaceful protesters helped generate public sympathy and support for the cause of civil rights. (Bodroghkozy, 2012)The modern Civil Rights Movement addressed a wide range of issues. While its immediate focus was on the South—the states of the former Confederacy, where segregation actually had the force of law—the movement sought to confront racial prejudice and injustice throughout American society. Click on the tabs below to learn more specifics about the civil rights movement.Select a list item tab, press enter, then search down for text. When you hear End of tab content, go back to the next list item to access the next list item tab.Public EducationThe Montgomery Bus BoycottFreedom RidesVoting RightsThe March on WashingtonFair HousingPublic EducationJames Meredith, escorted by U.S. marshals, integrated the University of Mississippi. (Click button for citation) The Supreme Court's Brown decision outlawed segregation in America's public schools, but the process of school desegregation proved to be difficult, drawn-out, and highly confrontational. In 1957, the governor of Arkansas called out the National Guard to prevent nine African-American students from enrolling at Central High School in Little Rock. President Eisenhower ordered troops of the 101st Airborne to escort the students to school, but a year later, the state closed all four high schools in the city, rather than integrate them. A year would pass before the Supreme Court ordered the schools reopened. (Bates, 1962.)In 1962, the governor of Mississippi refused to allow an African-American war veteran, James Meredith, to enroll at the University of Mississippi. President Kennedy intervened, ordering 500 U.S. marshals to escort Meredith to class; thousands of white protesters responded with a riot that killed two people and injured more than 300, including 166 marshals and 40 soldiers. A similar but less violent confrontation took place at the University of Alabama in 1963, when President Kennedy had to federalize the Alabama National Guard and order the troops to enforce the integration order.End of tab content.Fifty years after the fact, societal perceptions of the modern civil rights movement tend to focus on a few heroic figures, such as Rosa Parks, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Medgar Evers. And many students who did not live through the era may assume that the movement itself was unified and had a clear-cut agenda.In fact, there were many prominent civil rights leaders, not all of whom agreed at any given time. And there were a multitude of civil rights organizations; the so-called Big Four included the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC); the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); and the NAACP, among many others. Some of these groups were more inclined to compete with each other than to cooperate.Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam, at the podium (right). At left is heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali, then known as Cassius Clay. (Click button for citation) These groups had somewhat different agendas, with some more focused on voting rights, say, and others more focused on housing and economic issues. Nor did everyone in the movement agree on the principle of nonviolent protest; some leaders, such as Robert F. Williams of North Carolina, believed strongly that African Americans needed to arm themselves and fight back against anti-black violence. Other, more militant leaders, such as Elijah Muhammad of the Nation of Islam, rejected the philosophy of nonviolence and argued that African Americans should separate themselves completely from whites.While it is not accurate to say that the civil rights movement had any one, single leader, it is nonetheless clear that the movement began to crumble after the assassination of Martin Luther King in April 1968. The loss of King as an eloquent advocate of nonviolent protest definitely hurt the movement. And perhaps more important, the wave of racial violence that convulsed many cities in the wake of King's death shattered whatever fragile political consensus might have been forming behind the idea of comprehensive reforms to address the root causes of racial discrimination and African-American poverty. (Garrow, 2004)While the modern civil rights movement succeeded, in large measure, in bringing about the end of legal segregation in the Old South, the problems of racism and inequality—the legacy of "America's original sin"—have yet to be fully addressed.Week 5 Short ResponsesDeveloping a Thesis, step 3Use the historical evidence you gathered is Step 2 to answer the research question you posed in Step 1. The answer to your research question is your thesis statement. Be sure to respond to each question in 1-2 complete sentences, using proper grammar. Again, the material contained in this learning block may be helpful to you as you frame a response.Historical ContingencyContingency is the fourth of the "5 C's of Historical Thinking" that we first encountered back in Theme: Approaches to History: Change, Context, Causality, Contingency, and Complexity. Take this moment to refresh your memory of the 5C's.To understand the concept of contingency, we need to think of a few more C's: the causes, course, and consequences of a historical event. These three C's help us look at the interrelationship, or contingency, between many historical events:The causes of a historical event are previous events, all of which have a causal relationship with the later event;The course of a historical event consists of the many smaller events that make up the larger event; the course of an event is implied by the beginning and ending dates that define the event. The course of the modern Civil Rights Movement, for instance, consists of the many protests, demonstrations, and other political and social events that defined the movement, from 1954 through 1968; andThe consequences of a historical event are the subsequent events that it, in turn, causes.Theme: Analyzing History | Learning Block 5-2 | Page 1 of 2What Is Contingency?Is history inevitable? Are the events of our time predetermined, incapable of being changed by anything we do?Ask those questions of a philosopher, a physicist, or a theologian, and you're likely to get some interesting—and very convoluted—answers. But ask a historian, and what you'll hear is a clear and simple NO.One of the fundamental principles of history is the concept of contingency, the idea that each historical event depends (or is contingent on) previous events. Change one of those previous events, and you may change all the events that come after it. Or, to put it another way: history is not inevitable or predetermined, because everything that happens today can have an impact on what happens tomorrow. (Martin, 2016)Contingency is an important concept because it shows us how interconnected history really is, and because it requires us to explore those connections to understand the relative importance of different historical events. Such explorations have led to a historical approach known as counterfactual history, in which historians use "what if?" questions (known as counterfactual conditionals) to try to figure out which events had a major impact on the course of history.Not all historians believe counterfactual history is legitimate; as Martin Bunzl points out, a lot of counterfactual history has no real grounding, and is based on speculation rather than historical evidence. (Bunzl, 2004) And there's a real danger of slipping from counterfactual history into alternative history, a literary genre that plays the what if? game for its entertainment value and is not a legitimate form of historical scholarship.Regardless of how you feel about counterfactual history, the concept of contingency is still an important—and very useful—way to look at the relationship among different historical events.The Struggle for Voting RightsThe Fifteenth Amendment, which specifically guaranteed the right of all male citizens to vote, regardless of their "race, color, or previous condition of servitude," was ratified in February of 1870. Almost a century later, the ability of African Americans to vote in many states—essentially, those of the Old South—was routinely and sometimes violently thwarted.The obstacles to African-American voting that were erected over the course of the Jim Crow era were formidable: poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and outright physical intimidation. In the 1960 Presidential election, according to estimates by the NAACP, only about a quarter of eligible African Americans cast a ballot. That number increased sharply, to almost 60 percent, in 1964, but African-American turnout in the South—where most blacks were not even able to register to vote—remained very low. (The New York Times, 2014)Civil rights leaders had long recognized that safeguarding the right to vote was essential to expanding African-American rights in other spheres. But previous proposals to pass major voting-rights legislation—the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960—were watered down by Southern opponents in Congress and proved largely ineffectual. (Bardolph, 1970)In the wake of Lyndon Johnson's landslide victory in the 1964 Presidential election, civil rights leaders began a major push for a tough new voting-rights law. Johnson was sympathetic to their cause but wary of the political implications of a major fight for new civil rights legislation. But the brutal mistreatment of peaceful voting-rights protesters in Alabama, including the now-famous confrontation in Selma that became known as "Bloody Sunday," galvanized public opinion and forced Johnson to act. (Issacharoff et al, 2012)This learning block uses the history of the Voting Rights Act as the vehicle to hone your understanding of causality and contingency and to help you begin thinking about the use of historical evidence.The Voting Rights Act of 1965An 1879 cartoon criticized the use of literacy tests to deny African Americans the right to vote. (Click button for citation) From the beginning, supporters and opponents of African-American civil rights both understood the critical importance of voting rights. Supporters strove, after the Civil War, to ensure that freed slaves would have the political power that comes with voting; toward that end, they passed the Fifteenth Amendment, to guarantee voting rights, and the Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871, to combat the Ku Klux Klan's efforts to suppress black voting through intimidation and violence.But federal enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment effectively ceased with the end of Reconstruction in 1877. Opponents knew that allowing African Americans to vote would threaten the structure of white supremacy on which the Jim Crow South was founded. In addition to physical intimidation, then, Southern whites erected an imposing set of legal obstacles to deter blacks from voting: poll taxes, whites-only primaries, literacy tests, property qualifications, and grandfather clauses.In 1957, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. talked about those legal obstacles in his "Give Us the Ballot" speech; in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson spoke about them in an address to Congress:Select a list item tab, press enter, then search down for text. When you hear End of tab content, go back to the next list item to access the next list item tab.King: "Give Us the Ballot"Johnson: "Our Duty Must Be Clear"King: "Give Us the Ballot"[A]ll types of conniving methods are still being used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters. The denial of this sacred right is a tragic betrayal of the highest mandates of our democratic tradition. And so our most urgent request to the president of the United States and every member of Congress is to give us the right to vote. [Audience:] (Yes)Give us the ballot, and we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights.Give us the ballot (Yes), and we will no longer plead to the federal government for passage of an anti-lynching law; we will by the power of our vote write the law on the statute books of the South (All right) and bring an end to the dastardly acts of the hooded perpetrators of violence.Give us the ballot (Give us the ballot), and we will transform the salient misdeeds of bloodthirsty mobs (Yeah) into the calculated good deeds of orderly citizens.Give us the ballot (Give us the ballot), and we will fill our legislative halls with men of goodwill (All right now) and send to the sacred halls of Congress men who will not sign a "Southern Manifesto" because of their devotion to the manifesto of justice. (Tell 'em about it)Give us the ballot (Yeah), and we will place judges on the benches of the South who will do justly and love mercy (Yeah), and we will place at the head of the southern states governors who will, who have felt not only the tang of the human, but the glow of the Divine.Give us the ballot (Yes), and we will quietly and nonviolently, without rancor or bitterness, implement the Supreme Court's decision of May seventeenth, 1954. (That's right)(You can find the full text of the speech here. You can find an audio recording at this link.End of tab content. The modern Civil Rights movement that arose in the wake of the Brown decision placed a high premium on winning federal legislation to enforce voting rights. The movement focused its efforts on the states of the South, because the de jure denial of voting rights was a uniquely Southern issue; virtually no such legal structures had been erected in the North or West to deny blacks the franchise. Three efforts to pass voting-rights legislation were derailed by Southern opposition in Congress: voting-rights provisions of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1963 were watered down to the point of ineffectiveness.The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was passed in the wake of President Kennedy's assassination, included some voting-rights provisions but not the broad prohibition of literacy tests for which civil rights leaders had hoped. The Act's primary focus, rather, was on ending segregation in public accommodations and in public education.Following his landslide victory in the 1964 Presidential election, which also produced huge Democratic majorities in Congress, President Lyndon Johnson determined to push for a tough new voting-rights law. But his political advisers, concerned about the political impact of another civil rights battle so soon after passage of the Civil Rights Act, urged him to wait. (May, 2013)In early 1965, Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders, including James Bevel of the SCLC, began organizing voting-rights protests in Selma, Alabama, where the local sheriff had violently suppressed African-American voter registration efforts. In February, King and hundreds of other protesters were arrested for violating the city's anti-parade ordinance. King responded by writing "A Letter from a Selma Alabama Jail," which ran as an advertisement in The New York Times; the letter famously noted that, " This is Selma, Alabama. There are more negroes in jail with me than there are on the voting rolls." (King, 1965)Alabama police attack Selma-to-Montgomery Marchers on Bloody Sunday, 1965. (Click button for citation) Shortly after King's arrest, another voting-rights protest in Marion, Alabama, turned deadly when Alabama state troopers attacked the demonstrators; an African-American Army veteran named Jimmie Lee Jackson was fatally shot by police. At his funeral, James Bevel suggested that protesters march from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery to dramatize their cause. (May, 2013)Two weeks later, on March 7, 1965, about 600 protesters, led by John Lewis and Hosea Williams of the SCLC, began marching out of Selma. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the demonstrators met a small army of state troopers and county deputies; the law officers began beating the unarmed protesters with nightsticks, fired tear gas into the crowd, and charged the protesters on horseback. A total of 17 protesters were hospitalized, and another 50 were treated for injuries in what became known as "Bloody Sunday." (Reed, 1966)(To read excerpts from first-person accounts of the Bloody Sunday protest, go here.)The violence on the Edmund Pettus Bridge was captured by newspaper photographers and television news crews; the image of peaceful protesters being savagely beaten by the police outraged public opinion outside the South, and abroad. Eight days after Bloody Sunday, amid continuing violence against voting-rights demonstrators in Alabama, President Johnson addressed Congress and called for swift passage of his voting-rights proposal. Echoing the old spiritual that had become the anthem of the civil rights movement, Johnson declared that "We shall overcome" in the struggle for voting rights.Despite fervent Southern opposition and a 24-day filibuster in the Senate, the Voting Rights Act received final Congressional approval on August 4, 1965. Two days later, with Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks in attendance at the White House, Johnson signed the bill into law. (May, 2013)The Impact of the Voting Rights ActThe immediate effects of the Voting Rights Act were quickly felt. Voter registration surged among African Americans in the states of the Old South, the region directly targeted by the law's "special provisions." By 1970, a majority of eligible African Americans had registered to vote in nine of the 11 former Confederate states. In Mississippi, black voter registration increased from just 6.7 percent in 1964, to 59.8 percent in 1967. (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2016; U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 2001)President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 while Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and others look on. (Click button for citation) This surge in voter registration has led some legal experts to characterize the Voting Rights Act as " the single most effective piece of civil rights legislation ever passed by Congress." (U.S. Department of Justice, 2009) For a summary of the Act's key provisions, click on this link.Two key factors contributed to the effectiveness of the Voting Rights Act. The first was its limited scope: the "special provisions" of the Act applied to only those states and localities with a demonstrated history of discrimination against African-American voting rights. This limited scope allowed the Justice Department to use its enforcement resources most effectively, in areas where the potential for discrimination was greatest. The second was the Act's preclearance provision, which prevented any changes in voting laws from taking effect unless they were approved by the Justice Department or a federal court. [The Supreme Court suspended the preclearance provision in 2013.]Increased voter registration did not, however, translate immediately into increased political power for African Americans in the South. White-dominated state legislators responded to the Voting Rights Act by enacting new measures to limit the effectiveness of African-American voting: turning some formerly elective offices into appointive ones and changing many other elective offices to "at-large" seats, which diluted the impact of new black voters. Those same legislators also engaged in racial gerrymandering, redrawing legislative and Congressional districts to maximize white voting power and limit the effectiveness of African-American votes. (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 2001)Over time, Justice Department lawsuits reversed many of these political ploys. Key Supreme Court rulings, including Wesberry v. Sanders (1964), sought to reduce the impact of racial gerrymandering by applying the concept of "one person, one vote" to the issue of legislative redistricting. And later amendments to the Act required states, under certain circumstances, to create majority-minority districts to increase the odds that African Americans and other minority-group candidates would be elected to Congress.At the same time, the overall increase in African-American voter registration was not matched by a similarly sharp rise in African-American voter turnout. Nationally, the proportion of African Americans who actually cast a ballot in a Presidential election peaked at 58.5 percent in 1964—the year before the Voting Rights Act was passed—and did not return to this level until Barack Obama's first presidential campaign in 2008. (Flippen, 2014) Obviously, African-American turnout increased in Southern states, where registration had increased so sharply, but it declined in non-Southern states.Relatively low turnout among African-American voters is attributable to many different factors, including differences in income and education, as well as a perception that the political process is less relevant to their lives. (Fulwood, 2014) And relevance is, in some ways, related to race: like many other racial and ethnic groups, African Americans are significantly more likely to vote when a member of their own group is on the ballot. (Laney, 2011)Without question, the Voting Rights Act has led to sharply increased representation of African Americans in Congress, state legislatures, and local offices. In 1964, for instance, only five African Americans served in Congress; by 2015, that number had increased to 48. (U.S House of Representatives, 2016) And between 1965 and 1985, the number of African-American state legislators in the former sta