• Voting Rights Act of 1965
• Montgomery Bus Boycott
• Niagara Movement
• Jim Crow
• Lynching
• Brown v. Board of Education 
• Civil Rights Act of 1866
• CivilRights Act of 1875
• Civil Rights Act of 1964
• Constitutional Convention
• U.S. Declaration of Independence
• U.S. Constitution
• Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
• Civil Rights Cases (1883)
• Lithograph celebrating the 15th Amendment

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 


 

While the department is engaged in a series of events to mark the centennial of the founding of the Niagara Movement, we note that this year also marks, poignantly, the 40th anniversary of the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the 50th anniversary of the commencement of the Mongomery Bus Boycott that helped launch the modern civil rights movement in our country. As in the case of all major social movements, it is doubtful that the architects of the Niagara Movement could have foreseen the profound changes they would set in motion in a mere 60 or so years in the entire fabric of our nation. 
 
 

President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act in the Capitol Rotunda, Washington DC, as Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders look on,  August 6, 1965. LBJ Library/ Photo by Yoichi R. Okamoto

Meeting against the backdrop, at the turn of the century, of a Jim Crow-dominated society with its gruesome practice of ritually murdering African Americans in the context of public celebratory spectacles that came to be known as lynching, the legacy of the work of the intrepid few meeting across the border in Niagara Falls (for reasons not too difficult to surmise, given the times), includes Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

While these achievements were born of a struggle that had its roots going back nearly three hundred years to the shores of Africa, we note with profound satisfaction that the compass of its beneficiaries has been, as is fitting in a democracy, wider than the African diaspora to include all--Native Americans, women, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, the workingclass EuroAmerican masses, and so on--who had 
 

Marchers in Atlanta Commemorating the 40th Anniversary of the 1965  Voting Rights Act--Saturday, August 6, 2005 (source, and copyright 2005, AP news. All rights reserved).

originally been left out of the great democratic project launched by the founders of the American Revolution meeting at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. 

However, even as we celebrate these major milestones in the construction of our democracy we are reminded of the burden of eternal vigilance against the dark forces of reaction that are always bent on turning back the clock of progress. After all, the promise of a new democratic tomorrow had already been clearly laid out in the magisterial 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. Yet it did not take long to gut the intent of these amendments through such bogus concepts as “separate but equal” by means of a variety of instruments including, most sadly, the rulings of the Supreme Court in such cases as the Civil Rights Cases (1883) and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). 

Even today, the struggle to implement the Voting Rights Act to its fullest intent has not ended. The permanent disenfranchisement of felons even after they have served their time, being just one example; the undermining of the franchise of members of poor communities who cannot afford modern voting technologies being another. Moreover, we note with great concern that a disproportionately large number of those so affected come from minority groups. The struggle to build a better democracy therefore continues; it has not ended.

ygml/2005