On March 15, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress to urge equal voting rights for the African Americans. He used the term “we shall overcome” borrowed from African American leaders struggling for equal rights. Discrimination had taken the form of literacy, knowledge or character tests administered solely to African Americans to keep them from registering to vote.
Here is the link to watch the full speech on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxEauRq1WxQ
The speech came one week after deadly racial violence erupted in Selma, Alabama when police attacked a group of African Americans preparing to march to Montgomery to protest voting rights discrimination.
Civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King and over 500 supporters were attacked while planning a march to Montgomery to register African-Americans to vote. The police violence that erupted resulted in the death of a King supporter, a white Unitarian Minister from Boston named James J. Reeb. Television news coverage of the event galvanized voting rights supporters in Congress.
The Federal government intervened when a second attempt to march to Montegomery was stopped by local police. Finally, on March 21, the march was competed under the watchful eye of worldwide media.
On August 6, 1965, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, which made it illegal to impose restrictions on federal, state and local elections that were designed to deny the vote to African Americans. Initially, support of the Act was weak, especially in the South, but the Act gave African Americans the right to legally challenge voting restrictions. In Mississippi, African American voter turnout increased from 6% in 1964 to 59% in 1969.
If you want to learn more, the library has a large collection of books on both the civil rights struggle of the 1960’s as well as President Lyndon B. Johnson.
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