On a day like this, March 15th, year 1965, President Lyndon B Johnson addressed a joint session of congress in order to urge the passage of legislation which guarantees a voting right for all. He used a phrase “WE SHALL OVERCOME” which was borrowed from African-American leaders that are struggling for equal rights and He [Lyndon Johnson] made it known that every American Citizen must have an equal right to vote and he also reminded the people of the nation that the fifteenth amendment that was passed after the Civil War gave all the citizens the right to vote regardless of their race, or color.
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But it was quite disheartening that the states had already erected barriers against the constitution and had defiled the constitution also by making an act of discrimination against it which was taken in the form of literacy, knowledge or character test that was administered solely to African-Americans so as to keep them from registering and not giving them the chance to vote.
The speech “Their cause must be our cause too because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice and we shall overcome” was delivered by Johnson Lyndon eight days after the racial violence that erupted in Selma, Alabama.
Johnson Lyndon
The Police attacked the Civil rights leader, Rev. Martin Luther King and his over 500 supporters when they were planning a march from Selma to Montgomery so as to register African-Americans to vote which resulted into the death of one of the supporters of Martin Luther King, who was a white Unitarian Minister from Boston and His name was J James Reeb.
The police also blocked another attempt that was carried out to march to Montgomery and it took the federal intervention which led to the federalizing of the Alabama national guard and this led to addition of over 2,000 other guards so as to allow the march to Montgomery to begin which finally began on March 21st with over 3,000 participants under the glare of the worldwide news publicly.
However, on the 6th of August, President Johnson signed the voting rights act which made it illegal to impose restrictions on the federal, state and local elections that was designed to deny the votes to blacks but, in spite of this, the violence also continued just after the march to Montgomery was successfully completed on the 25th of march and four Klansman shot and killed the Detroit homemaker Viola Liuzzo as she drove the marchers back to Selma after the march.
In the South, the state and local enforcement of the act was initially weak but, the voting Rights Act gave the African-American voters the legal means and the rights to challenge the voting restrictions and it vastly improved the voter’s turnout as in Mississippi alone, the voter’s turnout among the blacks along increased from 6% in the year 1964 to 59% in the year 1969.
However, in the year 1970, President Richard Nixon extended the voting Rights Act and lowered the eligible voting age for all the voters to 18 years.