Voting Rights Act Turns 40

Forty years ago President Johnson, a Democrat from Texas, signed the Voting Rights Act into law after decades of brutal racial discrimination. This legislation stopped southern states from imposing restrictions on black voters. Johnson said, “Every American citizen must have an equal right to vote. Yet the harsh fact is that in many places in this country men and women are kept from voting simply because they are Negroes.” This outspoken support for Civil Rights surprised many of the movements leaders after the assassination of John Kennedy, who’d campaigned for a Civil Rights Act before his tragic assassination in 1963.

The previous summer, in 1964, college students had come from New York to the south to register black voters. Three of them had been killed, and their murder attracted the attention of President Kennedy. Their murder was investigated by Kennedy’s brother Bobby, and the Civil Rights Act was signed into law.

The next spring, in 1965 a group in Alabama began a march to the state capitol in Montgomery to protest restrictions against black voters. The marchers were confronted at the Edmond Pettus Bridge where they were beaten and gassed by the Alabama Police before they could get out of Selma. Two days later Martin Luther King came to lead them again to the bridge where the police had turned them back. After a Federal judge ruled that the marchers could continue despite disrupting traffic, 3200 people marched from Selma to Montgomery.

Later, one of those marchers taught high school high in Nashville, Tennessee. Lois R. Dunn was an exacting teacher — the kind that had high expectations and ran her classroom accordingly. I know because she was my Freshman and my Junior English teacher.

When we wrote essays, she circled every misspelled word. When we wrote poetry, she taught us iambic pentameter. When we read To Kill a Mockingbird, we talked about why Atticus Finch defended a black man accused of raping a white woman in the South. Like Finch, Mrs. Dunn was a woman of standards.

The route from Selma to Montgomery has now become a National Historic Trail. Mrs. Dunn has no doubt retired from teaching. But a whole slew of kids from Nashville understand spelling, grammar, poetry and human justice a little better because of a black college student who walked across a bridge in Alabama.-T