In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

3 The Wilcox County Voting Rights Fight In the mid-­ 1960s, outsiders easily could have been lulled into thinking that gradualism, a favored philosophy of liberal south­ ern whites, was working. The 1955–56 Montgomery Bus Boycott, organized by the Montgomery Im­ provement Association with Rosa Parks as a test case, forced that city to integrate pub­ lic transportation, although other forms of discrimination— especially barriers to voter registration—continued. The student sit-­in movement that swept the South in the early 1960s resulted in stiffer federal laws against segregation in pub­ lic accommodations. Although the activists protested the lack of compliance with federal laws, the federal government sel­ dom defended any civil rights activities unless forced to do so by pub­ lic opinion and po­ liti­ cal pressure. In 1961, Freedom Riders who tested federal laws requiring integrated seating on national bus lines were violently attacked and then jailed in Anniston , Birmingham, and Montgomery, Ala­bama, and other cities. News of attacks on the activists forced the federal government to sue states that refused to comply with interstate transportation laws and inspired a new wave of civil rights action across the South. In May of 1963, King convinced local and SCLC leaders to recruit children for demonstrations in Birmingham. The “Children’s Crusade” brought greater media and federal attention and was considered a success both in Birmingham and throughout Alabama.1 On August 28, 1963, before a large integrated crowd assembled in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Jubilation turned to grief and anger on September 15, 1963, when the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was bombed, leaving four little girls dead. During the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964, activists through­ out the South stepped up their fight against the prevailing pathology of segregation. The vast majority of free­ dom fighters were The Wilcox County Voting Rights Fight / 49 students and young adults. Cracks began to show in the foundation of white supremacy, but the sys­ tem continued to stand as long as black people could not vote, could not change policy, and could not participate in civic life outside of their own segregated communities. The 1964 Civil Rights Act overturned generations of state-­ sanctioned segregation in pub­ lic accommodations and in employment. It passed only after years of vicious police brutality, arrests, and attacks on nonviolent protesters and the accompanying litigation. The murder of young civil rights workers Cheney, Schwerner, and Goodman in Mississippi in June of that year is widely credited with speeding the signing of the act in July. But the 1964 Civil Rights Act did not fully address challenges to voting rights in the South. As summarized by civil rights veteran and lay historian Bruce Hartford, “The Act had little effect on voting rights. It did not eliminate literacy tests, one of the main methods used to exclude Black voters in the South, nor did it address economic retaliation, police repression, or physical violence against nonwhite voters. The Act also failed to address the pernicious notion of voter qualification—the idea that citizenship does not confer an automatic right to vote, but rather that voters must meet some arbitrary standard beyond citizenship.”2 SNCC had been working with grassroots organizers on voting rights since 1963, but it was not until the highly publicized violence of Bloody Sunday in March 1965 that the nation was forced to recognize that voting rights suppression would continue until there was a new, stronger federal bill. The average white north­ erner had no clue that almost all black citizens in the Deep South were prevented from registering to vote. SCLC, SNCC, and NAACP believed that ongoing legal intervention coupled with massive po­liti­cal organization would be required to enforce the provisions of this new bill as well as other existing but continuously violated civil rights laws. Black activists did not wait for the government to take action; they organized to change the system. In small communities through­ out the South, local leaders organized in churches and schools. In rural areas, organizers developed secret communication networks with word passed by children on school buses, farmers on mules, and preachers with cars. Wilcox County activists intensified their protests, increased their demands, and traveled to Selma, Montgomery, and Atlanta to be trained in nonviolent action by SCLC and SNCC. Each demonstration and protest was counted as progress on the road to free­ dom. Many participants recalled their marches, even...

Share