An End to Voting Bias Gave Birth to New Battles

When President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on Aug. 6, 1965, politicians and civil rights figures gathered around him. Johnson liked to memorialize the final passage of landmark legislation by using dozens of pens to write his signature. After each stroke, the president would give the pen to one of the guests as a souvenir. It was a classic Johnson touch--a mixture of magnanimity, grand theater and even grander ego.

The signing of the Voting Right Acts followed the same pattern, except on a larger scale; it took place in the Capitol Rotunda instead of the Oval Office. Johnson handed a pen to Emanuel Celler, the crusty Judiciary Committee chairman who had helped shepherd the bill through the House of Representatives. He offered a pen to Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield.

Johnson recognized James Farmer, the longtime civil rights activist and head of the Congress of Racial Equality. He acknowledged John Lewis, the young leader of the Student Nonviolent Action Committee, whose ferocious beating at the hands of the Alabama State Police had horrified the nation five months earlier. And, of course, he handed a pen to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who since leading the Montgomery bus boycott a decade before had been the moral center and leader of the civil rights movement.

But if you look at photographs of that day, what is most haunting is the realization of who is not there.

James Lawson isn’t there. A Methodist minister, a fervent admirer of Mohandas Gandhi and a conscientious objector to the Korean War, Lawson organized workshops in nonviolent protest in Nashville, Tenn. Those workshops led to the mass demonstrations in early 1960 in downtown Nashville against segregation. And those sit-ins, although not the first such protests, galvanized an extraordinary generation of young activists.

Diana Nash isn’t there. A student at Fisk, a predominantly black university in Nashville, and among the first students to attend the Lawson workshops, she was one of the tactical geniuses behind the civil rights movement: not just the Nashville sit-ins, but the 1961 Freedom Rides, and the Mississippi and Alabama voter registration campaigns of 1963 and 1964.

Robert Moses isn’t there. A 25-year-old former Harvard graduate student in philosophy, Moses was the first field representative of the Student Nonviolent Action Committee. In the summer of 1960, he traveled by bus throughout the deep South, from hamlet to hamlet, recruiting, organizing and offering seeds of hope. It was Moses who proposed that students come into Mississippi the next summer and help register voters.

Ella Baker can’t be found in the photographs either, nor can Bernard Lafayette or Amzie Moore or Fred Shuttlesworth--dozens upon dozens of people, barely remembered 35 years later, but instrumental in forcing the United States to finally live up to its ideals. The passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act--which together banned legal and political segregation--stand as perhaps the most transformative events in the American century. They began to redress, in the most fundamental way, the curse that was built into the U.S. Constitution: its refusal to grant those of black skin the status of human beings.

It’s easy now to think that somehow the civil rights movement was inevitable, the logical result of overwhelming social forces. But of course there was nothing inevitable about it. The forces arrayed against civil rights were powerful, and they weren’t just Southern sheriffs, congressmen and Klansmen: they included politicians like Ronald Reagan and government officials like J. Edgar Hoover. But mostly it was the habits and practices of an entire society whose interest it was to maintain two classes of citizens.

The signing of the Voting Rights Act signaled an end and a beginning. The bill dismantled the legal restraints that prevented blacks from voting, but it hardly ended the effects of 400 years of racism: horrific poverty and deeply ingrained prejudice. Those have proved harder to fight, and the civil rights movement soon shattered and began to fight on numerous different fronts.

But the act did fulfill much of its promise. There are now 8,868 black elected officials in the United States. Mississippi and Alabama, scenes of the most violent white resistance, now claim more black elected officials than any other states.

The Voting Rights bill, though, had other consequences as well. It spelled the end of the Democratic Party’s 100-year hold on the South. Within three years of the bill’s passage, Richard Nixon would win the presidency by employing what was called “the Southern strategy”--exploiting race to woo white voters to the Republican ledger.

More than anyone, Lyndon Johnson understood the political repercussions of the Voting Rights Act--knew that his party would be weakened for at least a generation. He was right. Republicans proceeded to dominate presidential politics for the next 24 years. He championed the bill anyway.