The SNCC’s leaders believed that any violence
against their young volunteers, since they were from the North,
would spark even more outrage than usual among northern whites.
Indeed, hundreds of Freedom Summer volunteers were beaten, bombed, shot
at, or arrested over the course of the campaign. Several even lost
their lives. In the most infamous case, FBI agents uncovered the
bodies of three volunteers killed by Ku Klux Klan members near Meridian,
Mississippi.
Despite the violence, the Freedom Summer campaign
succeeded. Volunteers registered tens of thousands of
black voters, many of them under the new Mississippi Freedom
Democratic Party (MFDP). More important, the
continued violence attracted increased attention and further awakened
northerners to the plight of southern blacks.
The Election of 1964
Black leaders from the new Mississippi Freedom Democratic
Party traveled to the Democratic National Convention in 1964 to
support Johnson and promote further civil rights legislation. Democrats, however,
including Johnson, refused to allow the delegates to speak and refused
to recognize the party. Although Johnson still supported the civil
rights movement, he feared that incorporating the MFDP into the
Democratic Party would prematurely alienate conservatives and end
any chance for more protective rights legislation. Although Johnson
understood party politics well and his fears were justified, many
MFDP activists, who thought of Johnson as an ally, were outraged.
Despite the slight, blacks continued to support Johnson, who captured
more than 90 percent
of the black vote in the election of 1964.
Just as important, Democrats also won control of both houses of
Congress.
The Selma Campaign
In 1965,
Martin Luther King Jr., the SCLC, and the SNCC launched yet another
campaign to provoke southern whites, this time in the city of Selma,
Alabama. The activists chose Selma because although blacks outnumbered
whites in the city of nearly 30,000,
only several hundred were registered voters. Tens of thousands of
black protesters petitioned for the right to vote outside Selma
City Hall, without success. Then, when the protesters marched peacefully from
Selma toward the governor’s mansion in Montgomery after a Sunday
church sermon, heavily armed police attacked the protesters with
tear gas and clubs, injuring and nearly killing many and arresting
thousands. The violence was highly publicized, and “Bloody Sunday,” as
the media dubbed it, shocked Americans in the North more than previous
injustices.
The Voting Rights Act
The events in Selma also angered President Johnson, who
immediately summoned Congress in a special televised session, requesting strong
legislation to protect black voters. An equally angry Congress overwhelmingly
passed the epochal Voting Rights Act in 1965. The
new law banned literacy tests as a prerequisite for voting and sent
thousands of federal voting officials into the South to supervise black
voter registration. As a result, the black voter registration rate jumped
dramatically, in some places from less than 10 percent
to more than 50 percent.
In effect, the Voting Rights Act finally accomplished what Radical
Republicans had intended with the Fifteenth Amendment nearly
a century earlier, in 1870.
Although the Voting Rights Act did not end segregation, it began
a positive transformation in the South.
