March 15th...This Day in History (Now with links to other events)

Johnson calls for equal voting rights 1965

 

On this day in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress to urge the passage of legislation guaranteeing voting rights for all.

Using the phrase “we shall overcome,” borrowed from African-American leaders struggling for equal rights, Johnson declared that “every American citizen must have an equal right to vote.” Johnson reminded the nation that the Fifteenth Amendment, which was passed after the Civil War, gave all citizens the right to vote regardless of race or color. But states had defied the Constitution and erected barriers. Discrimination had taken the form of literacy, knowledge or character tests administered solely to African-Americans to keep them from registering to vote.

“Their cause must be our cause too,”Johnson said. “Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”

The speech was delivered eight days after racial violence erupted in Selma, Alabama. 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.

A second attempt to march to Montgomery was also blocked by police. It took Federal intervention with the “federalizing” of the Alabama national guard and the addition of over 2,000 other guards to allow the march to begin.

The march to Montgomery finally began March 21 with over 3,000 participants under the glare of worldwide news publicity.

The violence, however, continued. Just after the march was successfully completed on March 25, four Klansman shot and killed Detroit homemaker Viola Liuzzo as she drove marchers back to Selma.

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 blacks.

While state and local enforcement of the act was initially weak, mainly in the South, the Voting Rights Act gave African-American voters the legal means to challenge voting restrictions and vastly improved voter turnout. In Mississippi alone, voter turnout among blacks increased from 6 percent in 1964 to 59 percent in 1969.

In 1970, President Richard Nixon extended the provisions of the Voting Rights Act and lowered the eligible voting age for all voters to 18.

 (More Events on This Day in History)

• American Revolution
• 1783 Washington puts an end to the Newburgh Conspiracy

• Automotive

• 1968 Construction begins on America’s highest vehicle tunnel

• Civil War

• 1831 Edward A. Perry born

• Cold War

• 1989 Gorbachev calls for radical agricultural reform

• Crime

• 44 B.C. The ides of March: Julius Caesar is murdered

• Disaster

• 1941 Blizzard unexpectedly hits North Dakota and Minnesota

• General Interest

• 44 B.C. The Ides of March
• 1820 Maine enters the Union
• 1917 Czar Nicholas II abdicates

• Hollywood

• 1972 Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather opens

• Literary

• 44 Julius Caesar is stabbed

• Music

• 1959 Frankie Avalon’s “Venus” hits #1

• Old West

• 1767 Andrew Jackson born

• Presidential

• 1767 Andrew Jackson is born

• Sports

• 1970 Bobby Orr scores 100 points in one season

• Vietnam War

• 1965 Army Chief of Staff reports on South Vietnam
• 1973 President Nixon hints at reintervention

• World War I

• 1917 Russian czar abdicates

• World War II

• 1939 Nazis take Czechoslovakia