Free at Last to Vote: The Alabama Origins of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (review)

J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 9 69 Petrie’s life and the ascent of Auburn University’s academic reputation and athletic program a delightful success story. Historians of sport, the South, and education, on the other hand, will likely be disappointed by the book’s narrow conception. JOSEPH M. TURRINI Wayne State University Free at Last to Vote: The Alabama Origins of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. By Brian K. Landsberg. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. xi, 264 pp. $34.95. ISBN 978-0-1006-1510-0. In traditional histories of the civil rights movement the March 7, 1965, attack on Dallas County civil rights activists by Alabama state troopers and members of Sheriff Jim Clark’s posse on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, known as “Bloody Sunday,” led President Lyndon Johnson to call for a voting rights bill in a speech before Congress on March 15. Federal legislators followed through, giving the president a far-reaching bill that he signed into law in August. Law professor and former Department of Justice attorney Brian K. Landsberg fills in missing pieces of the grand narrative in his book Free At Last to Vote, providing the legal back story for the events of that fateful spring. Using a combination of memoir, case analysis, and movement history, Landsberg’s multilayered narrative reminds us of the role the federal legal system played in changing the South and the importance of who holds positions within bureaucracies . He tells an important story about the civil rights movement that is relevant today as the country witnesses state efforts to restrict the right to vote using measures that look all too familiar to students of Alabama history. Landsberg unravels how this important piece of federal legislation was written so quickly. Although the violence witnessed that fateful day in early March was an important stimulus, it was not the only explanation for the new law. “The Voting Rights Act did not emerge from the void, fully formed,” he states. “Rather, it evolved from prior efforts. . . . Its less muscular predecessors laid the foundation. Social upheaval provided the catalyst. Professional, careful work helped shape the superstructure” (p. 148). By focusing on cases that originated in three Black Belt counties— Sumter, Elmore, and Perry—Landsberg shows how the components of the act grew out of three lawsuits tried by the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. Each case had a different presiding judge—Frank T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 70 M. Johnson of the Middle District, H. Hobart Grooms of the Northern District, and Daniel H. Thomas of the Southern District—and through this a greater understanding of the structures that maintained Jim Crow customs in the state becomes clear. Through Landsberg’s explanations of each case, readers see the operation of the civil rights movement up close. By taking a comprehensive approach to the civil rights movement in one state, it becomes obvious why a federal law was necessary. Trying cases on a county-by-county basis did not provide timely or effective relief to the injustice faced by black citizens, which explains why civil rights activists organized the marches leading up to Bloody Sunday. As Landsberg explains, “A rotten political system, spawned by the combination of oneparty rule and one-race rule, had placed much of the federal bench in bed with the state governmental apparatus” (p. 50). There are many strengths to this book. Landsberg begins by reminding readers of the significance of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 both for granting civil jurisdiction over voting discrimination cases to the Department of Justice for the first time (forming the Civil Rights Division to do this work) and for creating federal court-appointed voting referees. Because of these new laws, local people in the Black Belt came forward seeking relief, and federal lawyers representing them in district courts ultimately revealed the need for a far-reaching voting rights bill that relied “less on the local federal courts and more on the Department of Justice” (p. 3). Throughout the chapters that focus on each case, the deep roots...