From the end of Reconstruction through the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, white supremacists used numerous tactics to keep African Americans from accessing their constitutional right to vote.
The SNCC Legacy of struggle for freedom and self-determination in the form of voting rights cannot be fully appreciated without a deep understanding of the entrenched institutionalized racism and culture of White Supremacy out of which the nation’s long history of voter suppression and subversion were born.
It is tempting to think of universal voting rights as one of the fundamental pillars of our country, but access to the vote has been hard fought and even today we face many challenges and rollbacks.
Moreover although voting rights have always been essential, they are not a given and do not alone secure equality. The struggle for civil and human rights for all must continue.
African American political power gained during Reconstruction was overthrown by massive fraud and domestic terrorism.
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The federal government stood by as white supremacists regained control over state and local governments.
The Voting Rights Act (VRA), which was signed into law on August 6, 1965, was a significant victory for the Civil Rights Movement, southern African Americans, and American democracy.
It outlawed many of the strategies that had been used by white supremacists to disenfranchise Black citizens and included provisions to facilitate the registration of new voters.
Together with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act ended most of the remaining legal forms of white supremacy.
An understanding of the untold history of the VRA can inform and strengthen that struggle.
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During Reconstruction, African Americans used the vote to democratize the South.
Although only men were allowed to vote in formal elections, women and children often participated actively in Black community meetings, even voting on delegates and platforms.
This community-wide engagement with the vote translated into progressive laws, including policies that laid the foundation for free universal public education.
A prime example is Wilmington, NC, where whites in the Democratic Party conducted a coup d’etat that annihilated the legitimately elected local government (an alliance of Black Republicans and white populists) and destroyed the Black newspaper.
These included the “grandfather clause,” literacy and comprehension tests, the white primary, and the poll tax-all applied almost exclusively to African Americans.
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Whites also used economic terrorism and violence to harass and punish potential (and actual) voters.
The impact was wide scale disfranchisement based on race.
For example, in Lowndes, County, Alabama, before the Voting Rights Act, there were no Blacks registered to vote even though they made up 81% of the county’s population.
Mississippi native Mrs. Hamer experienced firsthand the dangers of trying to register to vote:
Even as Hamer and her husband struggled to find work and housing to care for their family, she continued her activism.
A year after her first attempt to register, Mrs. Hamer and eight other people returning from Citizenship Education training were arrested and viciously beaten.
She recalled, “after I got out of jail, half dead, I found out that Medgar Evers had been shot down in his own yard.”
Testifying at the 1964 Democratic Convention, Mrs. Hamer declared, “If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America.”
At times African Americans prioritized improving educational opportunities, securing land ownership, and developing the institutions-such as churches-that later provided a critical base for the Civil Rights Movement, but they never conceded their right to vote.
Even when it was extremely dangerous, there were always men and women trying to register and vote.
In 1944, the NAACP won a landmark case, Smith v. Allwright, ruling the white primary-where only white voters could participate in political primaries-unconstitutional.
This victory inspired an upsurge in Black voter registration that was reinforced by Black veterans returning home from overseas.
One of these veterans was Medgar Evers, who became Mississippi’s first NAACP field secretary and was assassinated in June 1963 for his civil rights work.
In 1955, the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, which Evers and Amzie Moore helped lead, hosted a meeting of more than 10,000 Black citizens.
Following the Brown decision and the rise of the white Citizens’ Council, there was a huge backlash.
The Supreme Court gradually outlawed discriminatory practices, like the grandfather clause, the white primary, and the poll tax, but in general the federal government played a relatively passive role.
This was exacerbated by the power of Southern Democrats (known as Dixiecrats) in Congress who used their power to advance states’ rights and white supremacy.
Partly because of the suppression of the Black vote, many Dixiecrats had considerable seniority, which allowed them to control key committees and make it difficult to pass civil rights legislation.
Some white supremacist judges, including a few nominated by Kennedy, blocked the department’s work at every turn and the FBI only reluctantly carried out the necessary investigations.
Under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI was more interested in undermining Dr. King than helping the Justice Department prove its racial discrimination cases.
Moreover, after initially promising to protect anyone working on voter registration, the Kennedy administration backtracked and the FBI flatly refused to protect civil rights workers, even when they were attacked on federal property in front of agents.
SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), an organization of young people that emerged from the 1960 sit-in movement, developed an approach to grassroots community organizing that has influenced every subsequent progressive movement.
Their voter registration work in the deep South was built around canvassing-going door-to-door, talking to people-and relied on patience, education, and building relationships.
The work could be slow and tedious.
Influenced by Ella Baker and community leaders, the young people in SNCC made decisions by consensus, helped develop leadership skills in others, and challenged hierarchies that privileged wealth and education.
In the summer of 1961, a group of about 16 young people put school and jobs on hold to become SNCC’s first field staff and commit to full time movement work.
Their approach to voter registration, which quickly found a base in the Mississippi Delta, was strongly influenced by WWII veteran Amzie Moore, working closely with SNCC’s Bob Moses.
Over the next four years-working with other organizations and allies-SNCC was successful at organizing rural African American communities and making it impossible for the country to ignore the violence and discrimination at the heart of Jim Crow and white supremacy.
Though SNCC was not acting alone, their work was at the heart of the movement that moved people to insist that our country eliminate the legal basis of white supremacy.
SNCC’s organizing led directly to the Voting Rights Act, expanding the electorate and ending the undemocratic stranglehold of the Southern Dixiecrats.
Perhaps most importantly, SNCC recognized and nurtured leadership in people that the rest of the country had dismissed, like Mrs. Hamer.
She went from a circumscribed life as a sharecropper with a 6th grade education to being a nationally-recognized leader and one of the first Black women seated on the floor of the Senate.
White supremacists responded to the voting rights campaign by manipulating the registration process, firing and evicting people, burning and bombing homes and churches, as well as beating and even murdering people.
White officials then used the low numbers of African Americans registered to vote to insist that Blacks had no interest in politics.
In response, SNCC organized Freedom Days, first in Selma, Alabama, in 1963and in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, in 1964.
Whether in the punishing sun or pouring rain, people lined up to demonstrate their desire to vote.
