There has been widespread discussion this week about the appearances in Selma, Ala., by Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Much of the comment has been misplaced in that it has focused on the Southern drawl adopted by both candidates and not on the larger topic of why candidates continue to use special techniques to “woo black voters.”
It’s difficult to divine exactly how the black vote is to be wooed these days, but judging from television clips, it apparently requires grossly simplifying, even distorting history.
Each year it seems the history of the civil rights movement gets more condensed. Young children just getting acquainted with the topic might well believe blacks were universally oppressed and it was only when state troopers attacked the marchers in Selma in 1965 that there was any recognition of the problem.
To be sure, the events in Selma were important, but they were part of a long chain of events that were themselves important. Before the distortions are cycled through another presidential campaign of posing, posturing and pretence, it might be time to turn off the television set and revisit the history books.
The Voting Rights Act passed in 1965 was the result of a lot more than the Selma march, and credit for it is properly shared by white and black citizens alike.
The 24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, barring the use of the poll tax in federal elections, was passed by Congress in 1962 and certified in 1964. In those states where the poll tax remained on the books, petition drives and lawsuits were launched to repeal it. In fact, in 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court officially wrote an end to the use of the poll tax, which had been used to hold down black voter registration.
The brutality in Selma occurred after a number of events had galvanized public opinion. The assassination of Medgar Evers, an NAACP official in Mississippi, in June 1963, and the bombing of a Birmingham church that same year which killed four young black girls had awakened many white voters to the cause of Southern blacks.
These concerns had produced widespread support among whites for black leaders like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and Whitney Young of the National Urban League.
The Voting Rights Act itself could not have been passed without the support of the white population. Indeed, the march in Selma depended in significant part upon white participation.
This fact sometimes gets lost in the retelling of the Selma story, but Charles Jones, who was head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s voter registration wing in 1965, didn’t forget it. He made the following comment in 2005 to the Richmond Times Dispatch regarding a second Selma march: “What amazed me was the crowd was black and white, professionals and clergy and lawyers and doctors and teachers and domestic workers of all colors and classes. I was awed that the organizing we had done out in the rural counties had resulted in this overwhelming mass of humanity saying you must do the right thing. If I am smiling, it’s because we made that kind of impact on this marvelous country.” A third march, two weeks after the first, attracted 25,000 marchers of all races.
Six months later, the Voting Rights Act was passed. In the run-up to that event, Northern Democrats and Republicans were virtually united in support of the bill. The final tally was 328 to 74 in the House and 79 to 18 in the Senate. And remember, Congress in those days was not a racially diverse body.
Today, there are thousands of blacks in office in the South and more than 40 blacks in Congress, but perhaps the most telling statistics have to do with voter registration. When Medgar Evers was gunned down in 1963, there were just 28,000 registered black voters in Mississippi. By 1982, 17 years after the Voting Rights Act, there were more than 500,000.
The nation will know it has really arrived in a new racial era when politicians stop using special techniques (and accents) to attract the “black vote” (which is 90 percent Democratic) – and when there is no longer such a thing as “the black vote.”
Al Knight of Fairplay (alknight@mindspring.com) is a former member of The Post’s editorial-page staff. His column appears on Wednesdays.
