“At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point that is man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.” — President Lyndon Johnson
The headline on the front page of the New York Times, 60 years ago this week, read, “Alabama police use gas and clubs to rout Negroes.
The eighth paragraph: “John Lewis, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was among the injured. He was admitted to the Good Samaritan Hospital with a possible skull fracture.”
The Selma Voting Rights Campaign had been going on for more than nine weeks at that point. Day after day, Black citizens, tried to enter the Dallas County Courthouse to register to vote. Day after day, Sheriff Jim Clark and his deputies blocked their path. Hundreds were arrested, and many were beaten. But the campaign had, so far, failed to attract the widespread sympathy of the nation.
“The world doesn’t know this happened because you didn’t photograph it,” Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., told Life magazine’s Flip Schulke, who’d put down his camera to assist a child who’d been knocked to the ground. “I’m not being cold-blooded about it, but it is so much more important for you to take a picture of us getting beaten up than for you to be another person joining in the fray.”
On March 7, 1965, photographers and network television captured the violence on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and changed the course of American history.
At 9:30 p.m., ABC interrupted the broadcast of Judgment at Nuremberg, an acclaimed 1961 film that explores Germans’ individual and collective responsibility for the Holocaust, to show the brutal footage.
“The juxtaposition struck like psychological lightning in American homes,” journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff wrote in The Race Beat, an account of the role newspapers and television played in the Civil Rights Movement.
Photographs of an unconscious Amelia Boynton – one showing a trooper wielding a billy club above her, another with a fellow marcher trying to lift her off the ground — were splashed across the front pages of newspapers and magazine covers not just in the United States but around the world.
On March 9, President Lyndon Johnson released a statement “deploring the brutality with which a number of Negro citizens of Alabama were treated when they sought to dramatize their deep and sincere interest in attaining the precious right to vote.”
On March 15, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was introduced in the U.S. Senate, jointly sponsored by majority leader Mike Mansfield, a Democrat, and minority leader Everett Dirksen, a Republican. President Johnson signed it on August 6, with Lewis, King, Rosa Parks and other civil rights leaders standing alongside him.
For decades, the Voting Rights Act enjoyed the full support of both parties. But around the moment Black voting rates started to reach parity with white rates, the Supreme Court in 2013 gutted the Act to remove a provision that voting changes in states with a history of suppression must be approved by the Justice Department. Subsequent Supreme Court decisions have further weakened the Act, and states have rushed to enact racially-motivated restrictions on voting.
This week, Rep. Terri Sewell – whose district includes Selma — reintroduced the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Among other provisions the legislation would require federal review of specific voting practices known to be used to discriminate against voters of color and restore voters’ ability to challenge racial discrimination in court.
When urging Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act in 1965, President Johnson said, “Rarely, at any time, does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself. Rarely are we met with a challenge, not to our growth or abundance, our welfare or security, but to the values and the purpose and meaning of our nation.”
Sixty years later, we face that challenge once again.
