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EPILOGUE A SEGREGATIONIST “SENSE OF HISTORY” Compared to the battle over the previous year’s Civil Rights Act, the congressional clash over the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was relatively tame. The real drama had already occurred in Selma, seat of an Alabama Black Belt county where less than 2 percent of the black majority had successfully registered to vote prior to the bill’s passage. In some neighboring counties, no African Americans had voted since Reconstruction . The nationally televised confrontation at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where Alabama troopers turned back civil rights marchers with clubs and tear gas, pressured Lyndon Johnson to demand passage of a new voting rights bill. The defeat of the 1964 filibuster marked a political watershed for civil rights allies and opponents alike. A year later, President Johnson’s invocation of the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome” in his voting rights appeal, Selma’s segregationist mayor remembered, “was just like you’d stuck a dagger in your heart.”1 Despite segregationists’ attempts to transform their forebears’ crusade for white supremacy into a dignified defense of racial separation, the Voting Rights Act hammered home the inseparability of political equality and social inclusion. While most segregationists distinguished their commitment to the color line from enthusiasm for political repression, their fear of black ballots persisted. Months before the showdown in Selma, segregationists attempted to preempt and dilute federal voting protections. In Georgia, where white Democrats had used the specter of the “Negro bloc vote” to mobilize white opposition for two decades, the legislature passed a 1964 bill that required candidates to win primary elections by a majority vote. Reeling from the elimination of the county-unit system and an upsurge in black voter registration, Georgia conservatives hoped the majority-vote measure would dilute “bloc” power. If an African American candidate received a plurality of votes in a crowded primary field, white voters would have the opportunity to rally behind the remaining white opponent in the mandatory run-off.2 The bill’s racial intent was dramatized by influential backers such as Denmark Groover, a seasoned legislator who had shepherded massive resistance bills through the Georgia House of Representatives in the mid1950s . After Groover had rallied legislators behind an interposition resolution and a bill that added the Stars and Bars to the Georgia state flag, 180 | Epilogue black voters in his district backed a white moderate challenger to helpvote him out of office. When Groover roared back into office in the early 1960s, the self-described “segregationist” and “reactionary” backed the majorityvote rule and other measures that diluted black political power. Across the South, racial conservatives backed similar measures that redrew legislative district boundaries and manipulated voting laws to their advantage.3 While Democrat-dominated state legislatures attempted to preserve some semblance of white democracy, some southern Republicans sympathized with their struggle. In the midst of the battle over the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Mississippi Republican Party head Wirt Yerger denounced the pending bill for “crucifying certain states” byenfranchising “ignorant, illiterate persons.” Making no apologies for race-driven party realignment, the veteran GOP organizer forfeited his chance to head the national organization of state party chairmen. Despite his yeoman’s work building a viable Republican Party in the most solidly Democratic southern state, Yerger’s lip service to the racial status quo hampered his national clout.4 Other critics of voting rights followed a different trajectory. Jim Lucier, a Detroit native and English Ph.D. who had moved to Richmond to work for segregationist editor James J. Kilpatrick, blasted the Voting Rights Act in the anticommunist John Birch Society’s American Opinion. “The vote,” Lucier warned, “is being pushed into Negro hands which, in some areas, have every reason from ignorance to avarice to destroy the Republic.” Arguing that “American ideals” did not include “the notion of racial or social equality,” Lucier declared, “the best system is undemocratic voting.” Constitutional amendments that enfranchised former slaves and prohibited poll taxes in federal elections, Lucier continued, “run counter to the spirit of the body of the document and to the Bill of Rights.” Lucier’s anti–civil rights editorials caught the attention of conservative journalist and political operative Jesse Helms, who praised Lucier’s “sense of history” as “nothing short of remarkable.” When Helms headed to Washington in 1973 for his first Senate term, North Carolina’s first Republican senator since Reconstruction lured Lucier away from Strom Thurmond’s legislative staff.5 Lucier’s take on history, embraced by unreconstructed...

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