Document Type
Forum Theme 2
Abstract
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was the pinnacle of the ten-year struggle to liberate African Americans from the shackles of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. Although the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave black men the right to vote way back in 1870, coupled with the 19th Amendment that gave women, including black women, the right in 1920, racism still abounded at election offices across the country—particularly, but not exclusively, among the Southern states. American Negroes, if you will, had been struggling for free access to the polls for decades, when major organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) redoubled their efforts in the 1950s and 1960s to register blacks to vote. They met up with sturdy, vitriolic, and savage opposition, with many losing their lives in the process: Medgar Evers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, Jimmie Lee Jackson, Rev. James Reeb, Viola Liuzzo, and numberless others whose names we dishonor by our forgetfulness.
Publication Date
2015-2016
Journal Title
UNIversitas
Volume
11
Issue
1
First Page
1
Last Page
4
Copyright
©2016 Reverend Michael Blackwell
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Blackwell, Michael Reverend
(2016)
"Commemorating the Voting Rights Act of 1965,"
UNIversitas: Journal of Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity: Vol. 11:
No.
1, Article 11.
Available at:
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/universitas/vol11/iss1/11
