Civil Rights Part 2

• Ending segregation was the first goal of the civil rights movement, now they’re moving onto voting.

  Despite legally being able to vote (AA and women), not a single black person was registered to vote in Mississippi.
• Poll Taxes - making people pay money to vote, for black people at the time they needed the money to live so they wouldn’t vote.

  Literacy Tests - different versions for black and white people, oral and written, the point is to make up nonsense questions to make people fail.

  Voucher - white people (registered) were not willing to voucher for black (non registered) people, therefore they couldn’t vote.
• SNCC launches a new voting campaign in Mississippi.

  SNCC’s Freedom Summer - asking people from all over the country to come to Mississippi and help African Americans get registered to vote, a lot of people will stay in Mississippi.
• People that are coming to Mississippi are facing lots of problems with the state law enforcement, the KKK, other haters of SNCC.

  • 3 guys who came out to Mississippi to help people to vote went missing and Miss. police doesn’t help find them.
  • SNCC spreads the word to find the 3 men.
  • Some people dressed up as farmers and snuck onto a farm
  • The bodies are found with bullets to the back of their head.
  • Pres. Johnson starts an investigation and arrests a handful of people who were involved.
• No Anti-Lynching laws so Mississippi only gave the people who committed this crime little time in jail.

  Called the Mississippi Burning Murders.
• A group of people who didn’t want to be a part of Mississippi’s southern Democratic party branched off and formed the MS Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP).
• Selma - SCLC goes to this city where Jim Clark is.

  SNCC and SCLC has tension, some SNCC agreed to work with the SCLC and some refused to work along with them.

  • Dr King and SNCC decide on a march from Selma to the Capitol
  • Lots of families join the march
• Edmund Pettit Bridge - the protesters get to the bridge, all up on the sidewalk of this bridge, when they cross to the highway two rows of state troopers are waiting for them.

  • John Lewis and Jozea Williams go up to Jim Clark to try and get the troopers to leave.
  • Clark tells them to turn around and leave, orders the troopers to attack the protesters with tear gas, whips, and batons.
  • Called Selma Bloody Sunday
• Dr. King comes back the next day (The FBI called his family and told them he was cheating so he had gone back home).

  • decide on another march, more people come to Selma than before
  • Tuesday: more protesters, more enforcement, Jim Clark is still angry.
  • Dr. King kneels and starts praying, so do the other protesters.
  • He gets up and turns around and leaves, Turnaround Tuesday.
• Dr. King starts talking to the president to find a solution to Jim Clark’s issue, but the Vietnam War is occurring so Johnson is stressed about both situations.

  George Wallace finally tells Clark to let the protesters through.

  • Next Day, protesters walk through the bridge successfully, get to Montgomery safely.
  • During this protests, other people in Selma were dying including 2 white catholic priests by Klansmen and angry white supremacists.
• SCLC has carpools and buses taking people back to Selma and their hometowns.

  Viola Liuzzo - one of the bus drivers driving people to the airport, when she was going back to get more people a truck of Klansmen run her car off the road. They shoot Viola and kill her, and shoot the other guy with her who was 25, but he didn’t die.

  Viola was the only white woman killed during the entire Civil Rights Movement.
• Activists start figuring out who the klansmen were that killed Viola, tell the federal government, FBI does nothing because one of the klansmen was part of Cointelpro and J Edgar Hoover protects them.
• Viola’s body was sent back for her funeral, lies are made up that she was having affair with the 19 yr old that was in the car with her and that she was a drug addict, and crosses were burned in her yard on the night of her funeral.
• Voting Rights Act of 1965 - can’t pass laws that makes it harder for just one group of people to vote, stops any new laws that stops black people from voting

  • absurd tests are prohibited (literacy & stuff)
  • list all counties and states that have discriminatory voting laws, tell these places that they can’t pass voting laws at all
  • if they want to pass a law, it needs to go to the federal government.
• 24th amendment - poll taxes, can‘t make someone pay to vote, voting should be accessible to everyone.

  John Lewis is in Congress in 2010.

  Shelby County v. Holder (2013) - takes the no-no list and throws it out because it’s based on old data.

  Texas has passed 30 diff. voter laws since this ruling
• Voter rights now done on Civil Rights Movement