Disfranchisement After Reconstruction Era - Civil Rights Movement

Civil Rights Movement

The NAACP's steady progress with individual cases was thwarted by southern states' continuing resistance and passage of new statutory barriers to expansion of the franchise. Through the 1950s and 1960s, private citizens enlarged the effort by becoming activists throughout the South, led by many churches with black congregations and their leaders, and joined by young and older activists from northern states. Nonviolent confrontation and demonstrations were mounted in numerous Southern cities, often provoking violent reaction by white bystanders and authorities. The moral crusade of the Civil Rights Movement gained national media coverage, attention across the country, and a growing national outcry for change. Violence and murders in Alabama in 1963 and Mississippi in 1964 gained support for the activists' cause at the national level. President John F. Kennedy introduced civil rights legislation before he was assassinated.

President Lyndon B. Johnson took up the charge. In January 1964, President Lyndon Johnson met with civil rights leaders. On January 8, during his first State of the Union address, Johnson asked Congress to "let this session of Congress be known as the session which did more for civil rights than the last hundred sessions combined." On January 23, 1964, the 24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, prohibiting the use of poll taxes in national elections, was ratified with the approval of South Dakota, the 38th state to do so.

On June 21, civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney, disappeared in Neshoba County, Mississippi. The three were volunteers aiding in the registration of black voters as part of the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project. Forty-four days later the Federal Bureau of Investigation recovered their bodies from an earthen dam where they were buried. The Neshoba County deputy sheriff Cecil Price and 16 others, all Klan members, were indicted for the murders; seven were convicted.

On July 2, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This Act prohibited segregation in public places and barred unequal application of voter registration requirements. It did not abolish literacy tests, however, and these had been used to disqualify blacks and poor white voters.

As the United States Department of Justice stated, "By 1965 concerted efforts to break the grip of state disenfranchisement (sic) had been under way for some time, but had achieved only modest success overall and in some areas had proved almost entirely ineffectual. The murder of voting-rights activists in Philadelphia, Mississippi, gained national attention, along with numerous other acts of violence and terrorism. Finally, the unprovoked attack on March 7, 1965, by state troopers on peaceful marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, en route to the state capitol in Montgomery, persuaded the President and Congress to overcome Southern legislators' resistance to effective voting rights legislation. President Johnson issued a call for a strong voting rights law and hearings began soon thereafter on the bill that would become the Voting Rights Act." This outlawed the requirement that would-be voters in the United States take literacy tests to qualify to register to vote. It also provided for recourse for local voters to Federal intervention and oversight, and monitoring of areas that had had historically low voter turnouts.