Democratic Institutions: The Voting Rights Struggle in Selma, Alabama

Beginning in 1964, the world looked on as American Civil Rights Movement struggled in the Southern United States to gain the right to vote for African Americans even though the era of Segregation between 1865-1954 had officially ended. 

In the 1950s, the Civil Rights Movement increased pressure on the federal government (https://www.nps.gov/articles/votingrightsact.htm) to protect the voting rights of racial minorities. In 1957, Congress passed the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction: the Civil Rights Act of 1957. This legislation authorized the Attorney General to sue on behalf of persons whose Fifteenth Amendment rights were denied.  More protections were enacted in the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which allowed federal courts to appoint referees to conduct voter registration in jurisdictions that engaged in voting discrimination against racial minorities.

Although these acts helped empower courts to remedy violations of federal voting rights, strict legal standards made it difficult for the Department of Justice to successfully pursue litigation. For example, to win a discrimination lawsuit against a state that maintained a literacy test, the Department needed to prove that the rejected voter-registration applications of racial minorities were comparable to the accepted applications of whites.The Department's efforts were further hampered by resistance from local election officials, who would claim to have misplaced the voter registration records of racial minorities, remove registered racial minorities from the electoral rolls, and resign so that voter registration ceased.

March for Voting Rights 1964 Selma, Alabama

Selma, Alabama March