1. Voting Rights Campaigns

2. Focus Task
• What does the phrase “10 Million Americans Who Haven’t Got the
Price” mean?
• The people in the cartoon appear to be all white. Why do you think Dr.
Suess chose not to have people of other races in the cartoon?
• Why do you think white supremacists in the south used the poll tax to
exclude African American voters? Why do you think they weren’t
concerned about poor white voters?
• What does Dr.
Suess mean when
he titled the
cartoon
“Democracy’s
Turnstile”?
• Do you think the
cartoon would
have greater
resonance during
WWII? Why or
why not

3. Civil Rights Bill & Voting Rights
• JFK brings hope
– JFK’s presidency seen as one of hope
– CRM leaders wanted a Civil rights Bill
that would enshrine black rights
– JFK & brother, Bobby (Attorney
General) wanted to concentrate on
voting rights
– If blacks could vote, that power would
lead to further legislation to enshrine
civil rights
• NAACP & CRM groups focused on
voting rights campaign (VRC)
– Organized courses on voting
procedures
– Registered black voters faced threats,
intimidation & violence
– VRC greatly helped by fact that CRMSweet Honey in the Rock’s We Want the Vote

4. Back to Birmingham, Alabama,
1963• Birmingham, Alabama, April 1963
– MLK organized march
– City still not compliant w/ SC
desegregation order (remember
buses?)
– Police notoriously racist, w/ links to
KKK, especially police chief Bull
Connor
• Goal of march to show nation city’s
racism
– Bull Connor obliged
– W/ national media watching Connor released
fire hoses & attack dogs on peaceful
protesters
– 100+ protesters arrested, including MLK
Ragtime-Original Broadway Cast, ‘Til We Reach That Day

5. From Birmingham to Washington,
D.C.• Kennedy responds
– May: pressured Governor George
Wallace to release prisoners, give more
jobs to blacks and allow blacks to be
promoted
– Birmingham desegregated but bitter
– September: KKK bomb killed four black
children in a Birmingham church
• August 1963, Washington, D.C.
– MLK holds most high-profile event
– 200,000 blacks & 50,000 whites
marched
– Goal was to pressure JFK to introduce
Civil Rights bill
– No trouble on march, not even litter
– MLK gave famous ‘I have a dream’
speech
– Event had tremendous positive impact
on American public opinion of King,Excerpts from MLK’s ‘I Have A Dream’ speech in Washington, D.C.

9. How much progress had been made in achieving civil
rights by August 1963?

10. Civil Rights Act & ‘Freedom Summer’
1964
• By 1963 CRM key national issue
– Everyone had an opinion on it
– Nov’ ’63: JFK assassinated, LBJ
President
• Lyndon Baines Johnson & CRM
– LBJ committed to ideals of CRM
– 2 July 1964: signed Civil Rights Act (CRA)
– CRA made discrimination by gov’t
contractors in areas such as housing &
employment illegal
• Summer of 1964: ‘Freedom Summer’
– SCLC increased voter registration efforts
– Many northern, young, white people
helped
– W/in 20 months an additional 430,000
black southern voters were registeredIn That Great Getting’ Up Morning

11. Voting Rights & Selma, Alabama
• 1964, Mississippi burning: 3 VRC
workers murdered (Schwerner,
Goodman, Chaney)
• Selma Ala. one of worst discrimination
areas
– Early 1965: MLK targeted it & marched
– Only 2.4% of blacks were registered
– Brutally racist sheriff, Jim Clark
– Clarke banned march but 600 marched
– Marchers brutally attacked, ‘Bloody
Sunday’
– MLK organized 2nd
, token, march but turned
back to avoid bloodshed
– Radical black activists denounced MLK
– King’s restraint instrumental in getting LBJ’s
Voting Rights Bill into Congress in 1965
• Voting Rights Act of 1965
– Allowed gov’t agents to inspect voting
procedures
– Ended literacy tests
– After 1965 five major cities had blackLBJ taped phone calls related to Mississippi case

12. On 7 March 1965, 525 to 600 civil rights marchers headed east
out of Selma on U.S. Highway 80. Discrimination and
intimidation had prevented Selma's black population, roughly
half of the city, from registering and voting; three weeks earlier,
18 February 1965, a trooper (Corporal James Bonard Fowler)
shot Jimmie Lee Jackson as he tried to protect his mother and
grandfather in a café to which they had fled while being attacked
by troopers during a civil rights demonstration. Jackson died of a
massive infection at Selma's Good Samaritan Hospital eight days
later. The marchers hoped to bring notice to the violations of
their rights by marching to the state capitol in Montgomery.
In their first march, led by John Lewis and the Reverend Hosea
Williams, they made it only as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge,
six blocks away. State troopers and the Dallas County Sheriff's
Department, some mounted on horseback, awaited them. In the
presence of the news media the lawmen attacked the peaceful
demonstrators with billy clubs, tear gas, and bull whips, driving
them back into Selma.
Brutal televised images of the attack, which presented people
with horrifying images of people left bloodied and severely
injured, roused support for the US civil rights movement. Amelia
Boynton Robinson was beaten and gassed nearly to death — her
photo appeared on the front page of papers and newsmagazines
around the world. Seventeen marchers were hospitalized, leading
to the naming of the day, "Bloody Sunday".

13. Activity: Evaluating MLK’s effect
• Martin Luther King has been greatly praised. History has
almost made him onto a saint. But at the time he was
criticized by many political, Church and community leaders.
He was even criticized by fellow black activists. Here is a
summary of the criticisms:
– King was pushing the pace of change too fast and the USA was not
ready. He should be more patient.
– King was pushing too slowly-waiting for the Supreme Court to change
a law would take too long. He should be less patient.
– His non-violent actions provoked people into violence from which black
people suffered.
– Non-violence made black people victims. They should fight violently
against white discrimination.
– Black people should not try to fit into the white way of life-they should
achieve equality but keep separate from white people.
– How can a man with the moral failing of unfaithfulness to his wife be
allowed to represent such an import movement?
• Using all that you have learned write a speech for King

14. Fin

15. PSDs on Civil rights Bill & Voting Rights
• Instead of submitting to surreptitious cruelty in thousands of dark
jail cells and on countless shadowed streets, we are forcing our
oppressor to commit his brutality openly-in the light of day-with the
rest of the world looking on. To condemn peaceful protesters on the
grounds that they provoke violence is like condemning a robbed
man because his possession of money caused robbery.
– MLK commemorating his tactics in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963.
Critics had accused him of deliberately stirring up violence
• But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and
fathers at will and drown your brothers and sisters at whim; when
you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your
black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your
twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of
poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you are harried by
day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro … when
you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of nobodiness; then
you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.
– Extract from MLK’s letter from Birmingham jail, Alabama, 1963

16. PSDs on Civil rights Bill & Voting Rights
• I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the
true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all men are created equal. I have a dream that one day on the
red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former
slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state
sweltering in the heat of injustice … and oppression will be
transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream
that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they
will not be judged by the color of their skin but the content of their
character.
– From MLK’s most famous speech, Washington, D.C., August 1963