Bloody Sunday 123stop this bill,’ he told an aide. ‘We can’t deny the Negroes a basic constitu-
tional right to vote.’ The administration finally shut off the debate, and
Johnson signed the measure in the same place that Lincoln signed the
Emancipation Proclamation. At a private meeting that day, the president
implored SNCC’s John Lewis to get other blacks to vote: ‘You’ve got to go
back and get those boys by the balls. Just like a bull gets on top of a cow.
You’ve got to get ’em by the balls and you’ve got to squeeze, squeeze ’em till
they hurt.’
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 confirmed that blacks were fully
American citizens and rewrote the rules of southern politics that had pre-
vailed since Reconstruction. In states and counties where less than half the
population voted in the 1964 election, the law automatically suspended lit-
eracy and understanding tests. If too few blacks registered after the tests were
suspended, the executive branch could dispatch federal registrars to enroll
the disfranchised. This triggering mechanism brought Alabama, Georgia,
Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Virginia, and parts of North Carolina
under federal supervision. Because the law circumvented local courts, which
ignored black voting rights, the measure had an immediate impact. Within a
month of the bill’s enactment, over 60 per cent of Selma blacks registered,
including Cager Lee, whose grandson was killed by the police. One of the
first political casualties was none other than sheriff Jim Clark. To stave off the
inevitable, he hosted a barbecue for blacks, but lost anyway to his former
deputy, Wilson Baker.
In some places, whites lashed back with deadly violence. In a Lowndes
county, Alabama, grocery store, a fortnight after the Voting Rights Act passed,
a highway department worker and part-time deputy sheriff killed
Episcopalian seminarian Jonathan Daniels of New Hampshire. The bullet
was meant for a black teenager who wanted a soft drink, but Daniels shoved
her out of danger. Despite eyewitness testimony, the deputy sheriff was
acquitted, and one of the jurors jovially greeted the freed defendant: ‘We
gonna be able to make that dove shoot now, ain’t we?’ In January 1966,
voting-rights organizer Sammy Younge, Jr., a Tuskegee Institute student, asked
to use a gas station bathroom, and was shot in the head by the attendant.
An all-white jury ruled that the attendant acted in self-defense. Days later,
Vernon Dahmer, a respected 58-year-old Mississippi merchant and head
of Hattiesburg’s NAACP, was murdered by klansmen. The same day that
Dahmer announced over the radio that blacks could pay their poll taxes in
his grocery store, the White Knights tossed Molotov cocktails into his home.
Dahmer fired at the assailants as his family escaped, but he died of smoke
inhalation. The murder’s mastermind, imperial wizard Sam Bowers, boasted
that ‘a jury would never convict a white man for killing a nigger in Mississippi.’
He was partly right, thanks to jury tampering. Bowers had ordered nine
Voting Rights Act of 1965:
This federal law banned
literacy tests and intim-
idation at the polls, and
dispatched federal regis-
trars to locales where
voting totals fell below
50 per cent of those
eligible.