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VIH / The First Hurrah: Black Ballots The scene was chillingly familiar. Blacks and whites marched down Broad Street with Pettus Bridge looming in the distance. Freedom songs filled the springmorning air. Alabamastate troopers flanked the bridge and the highway to Montgomery beyond.Television crews and reporters watched expectantly. But thiswas ten years later, and the five thousand marchers walked in commemoration, not apprehension. The state troopers were there toprovidean escort, not to engagein combat, and the media werethere to record a solemn though happyritual, not to depict a sacrifice. A few months later, Congress would almost routinely approvethe extension of the Voting Rights Act by lopsided majorities in both houses and with a majority of southern lawmakers supporting the measure. Still later, a diminished and crippled George Wallace, the governor who refused to meet with the voting-rights demonstrators, would seek them out at the Dexter AvenueBaptist Church. Andat the Democratic National Convention in the summer of 1976, a panoply of southern leaders, black and white, Wallace and Coretta Scott King, and the Democratic presidential nominee, Jimmy Carter ofGeorgia, mounted the podium and led the delegates in a rousing rendition of "We Shall Overcome." If the struggle for black freedom in the South was also about regional redemption, then these events were witness to the extirpation of race pride as a regional sin and burden. The events were also symbolicof how the battle for the soul of the South had shifted its locus from the streets to the ballot box in the decadeafter 1965. Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson, a beneficiary of the new political consciousness among blacks, declared that "anyone looking for the civil-rights movement in the streets is fooling himself. Politics is the civil-rights movement of the 19705. Politics is our first hurrah. It's where things are today." The Magic Ballot: Black Political Power and Officeholding Indeed, the prospects of the ballot for blacks seemed limitless after 1965. Unlike a lunch counter or a movie house, the voting booth was 174 The First Hurrah 175 something all adult blacks, regardless of means or location, could enter . In addition, the southern political system had been one of the major props of white supremacy. Politicians had harangued their constituents on the importance ofmaintaining racial purity in public life, since the system depended upon white solidarity and black isolation. Now that blacks werenolongeroutcast, it wasevident that the system itself would undergo basic change and that the lives of previously disfranchised blacks could only change for the better. Soon after passage of the Voting Rights Act, Martin Luther King predicted that the ballot for blacks "will help to achieve many far-ranging changesduring our lifetime." Within a decade, southern white political leaders were confirming King's judgment approvingly. As Louisiana governor Edwin Edwardssummarized, the act "provided the catalyst f o r . . . black power at the polls, not only in electing huge numbers ofblack legislators , local officials and even now some congressmen, but more important in making white politicians sensitive to their needs and desires." And Alabama senator John Sparkman, asked to assess the state of southern politics in 1974, responded that he was especially grateful for voting rights because it eliminated "the civil rights question as apolitical issue." For those leaders who feared the worst, Republican congressman John Buchanan from Birmingham reassured that black enfranchisement "has hurt our state approximately as much as black participation has hurt Bear Bryant's football team." The widespread approbation of black electoral participation reflected a recast southern political system that was significantly more open than the exclusive and fear-ridden mechanism it replaced. No longer encrusted with the barnaclesofracism and accompanying demagoguery , southern politics was perhaps more prosaic, but its leaders could attend to more immanent regional issues. The result wasparticularly rewarding forblacks because, lacking a ballot, they had lackeda voice, and political leaders could safely ignore their needs. Social and political invisibility had complemented each other. The ballot, however , opened up new possibilities. Blacks sensed these opportunities immediately and proceeded to transform the Voting Rights Act from a vehicle to register voters to a means to attain political power.Voter registration proceededbriskly. In the nine Deep South counties chosen initially by the Justice Department to receive federal registrars, the number of blacks enrolledquadrupled from 1,764 to 6,998 within one week. Leflore County in Mississippi, a bloody voter-registration battleground where SNCC workers had succeeded in registering 33 black voters in four years, [3.143.9.115] Project MUSE (2024-04-24...

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