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BILL MOYERS: Bless you, Marty. But do we have to take our
cue from Brazil? We've seen collective action work before to make this a better country.
Some of us have even been around long enough to remember the fight for voting rights 50
years ago. We remember the protests by courageous men and women who put their lives on the line,
and the political skills of President Lyndon Johnson and the Congress that passed the Voting
Rights Act of 1965. I worked for LBJ and I was there when not long after peaceful protesters
in Selma, Alabama, had been ruthlessly beaten by white thugs in official uniforms. The President
went before a joint session of Congress and turned the anthem of the civil rights movement
into a hymn of freedom for all:
PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON: What happened in Selma is part of a far larger
movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of
American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their
cause must be our cause too. Because it's not just Negroes, but really it's all of us,
who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.
BILL MOYERS: The Voting Rights Act passed the Senate by
a bipartisan vote of 77 to 19. Yes, 77 to 19. But even so, many conservatives opposed
it then, and have tried ever since to nullify it. Late last month, they succeeded. The Supreme
Court's five conservative justices declared the key provision of the Act outdated. Nine
states with a pattern of denying minorities the right to vote, most of them former members
of the Confederacy, no longer have to get federal approval to change their voting procedures
in any way. Several of those states immediately set out to implement restrictive new voting
laws that before the ruling would have been found discriminatory.
By coincidence, the very weekend before the Supreme Court's decision disemboweled that
historic legislation, I had finished reading a masterful new account of the events leading
up to its passage. This is it: "Bending Toward Justice; The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation
of American Democracy." You will not find in one volume a more compelling story of the
heroic men and women who struggled for the right to vote, or a more cinematic rendering
of the political battle to enact the law, or a more succinct telling of the long campaign
to subvert it. The author is with me now. Gary May is a professor of history at the
University of Delaware and winner of the Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American
Historians. Welcome.
GARY MAY: Thank you very much.
BILL MOYERS: What were you thinking as the Supreme Court
gutted the Voting Rights Act?
GARY MAY: I thought first of the people you mentioned,
the people who have been forgotten by history who for decades had been risking everything,
their homes, their jobs, and their lives and
I thought, "Here are these five men, men of privilege, men who'd served as US attorneys
judges-- Thomas, an administrator. How could they possibly understand the world of those
men and women who fought and died for the Voting Rights Act. They don't seem to understand
it at all. They think it's all past.
BILL MOYERS: By coincidence I had just recently seen C.T.
Vivian, he was one of Martin Luther King's top aides leading those demonstrators trying
to vote in Selma--
GARY MAY: Uh-huh.
BILL MOYERS: --when the infamous Sheriff Jim Clark wouldn't
let them pass. Here is the scene.
C.T. VIVIAN: You are breaking the injunction by not allowing
these people to come inside this courthouse and wait—
This courthouse does not belong to Sheriff Clark. This courthouse belongs to the people
of Dallas County. And these are the people of Dallas County. And they have come to register.
And you know this within your own heart, Sheriff Clark. You are not as evil a man as you act.
You know in your heart what is right.
What you're really trying to do is intimidate these people by making them stand in the rain,
keep them from registering to vote. And this, this is the kind of violation of the Constitution,
the violation of the court order, the violation of decent citizenship.
You can turn your back on me, but you cannot turn your back upon the idea of justice. You
can turn your back now, and you can keep the club in your hand. But you cannot beat down
justice. And we will register to vote because as citizens of these United States, we have
the right to do it.
SHERIFF JIM CLARK: I'm looking down the line and seeing all the
people who have been in jail for felonies. That's what I'm looking at—
C.T. VIVIAN: Precisely right. And if they, and if they're
not to vote, you'll be able to find that out. But you're not until they're -- until they're
on the register. And many of those have the felony action because Sheriff Clark made them
a felony action, not because they were rightfully [...] You don't have to beat us.
SHERIFF JIM CLARK: So get out of here.
C.T. VIVIAN: You don't have to beat us. Arrest us.
GARY MAY: That was an extraordinarily important moment.
A few nights later, Reverend Vivian was asked to preach at a church in Marion, Alabama,
not too far from Selma. And he did that. And the parishioners were going to march on the
jail afterwards where one of their colleagues had been unfairly imprisoned.
Reverend Vivian left. He didn't join that march. And what happened was that the parishioners
came outside. The demonstrators came outside to face almost a mob of Alabama police, local
police. Jim Clark was there as well.
And in the melee that followed, a young civil rights leader named Jimmie Lee Jackson was
killed by an Alabama state trooper while he was trying to protect his mother and grandfather
from a beating. And it's thought that Clark and the others were there to get Vivian for
that encounter that they had.
And of course, the Marion people were so distraught over Jimmie Lee Jackson's death that one of
them said, "Let's take his coffin and to George Wallace in Montgomery and put it on the capitol
steps." And from that came the idea of this march from Selma to Montgomery. And so there
was a debate in King's circle. Should they go forward they might encounter again what
had been encountered in Marion. And King's advisors were divided. Some said, "Yes, let's
go forward." King himself was uncertain.
BILL MOYERS: As you know and write about, President Johnson
didn't want that march to happen either. Now, of course, he changed his mind later.
And when Lyndon Johnson changed his mind, he came out the cross of a charging bear and
a crafty fox. But at the moment, he was doing what he could to prevent that march from happening.
GARY MAY: Uh-huh. Which is another irony, isn't it?
Because here is the event that almost never took place. And the event that Lyndon Johnson
wanted stopped, the event that Martin Luther King initially had opposed. And, of course,
it turns everything around.
BILL MOYERS: And as you know, it came to be called "Bloody
Sunday."
GARY MAY: Uh-huh.
BILL MOYERS: Here is that scene.
MALE POLICEMAN: It would be detrimental to your safety to
continue this march. I will say it again. You are to disperse. You are ordered to disperse.
Go home or go to your church. This march will not continue. Advance towards the groups.
See that they disperse.
GARY MAY: It was so terrible. One person, we heard a
person calling for a doctor. Someone called for an ambulance to Sheriff Clark. And Sheriff
Clark replied, "Let the buzzards eat them." And what was so extraordinary was that it
was captured on film. And that proved to be absolutely critical.
Journalists, print journalists and photographers were there. They got their cameraman. They
got the film back to New York very quickly. And ABC was the first to break the news by
interrupting the movie of the week, which again, in an amazing coincidence was Judgment
at Nuremburg, the 1961 film about the Nazi war trials.
And people were stunned. They just watched the footage. There was no narration. And they--was
this America? I mean, they couldn't believe it. They dropped everything to join King's
campaign. Others besieged Lyndon Johnson in the White House, sat in, a group of them in
the White House.
BILL MOYERS: What do these unanticipated, unexpected, unintended
consequences of the convergence of such forces, what do they tell you about history, how it
gets made?
GARY MAY: That it's primarily an accident. You know,
sometimes, we see this story as one of Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson. They get together
and we have the Voting Rights Act. But, of course, it's a much larger story.
And it's a perfect example of the value of collective change to bring about progress
in this country, people getting together and being committed and willing to risk their
very lives to bring something when the country desperately needs it.
BILL MOYERS: But it's clear to me that if there hadn't
been this steady witness and martyrdom of these young men and women in the South, and
a progressive President, the result wouldn't have been the same. If you'd not had the pressure
from below and if you'd had a conservative President, history wouldn't have come the
way it has come to us.
GARY MAY: Yes. And once Johnson decided that bill was
going to go to the Congress that he was going to give that great address. He felt liberated.
BILL MOYERS: I was standing off to the right below the
president on the floor of the House. And I could look right into the eyes of senators
and representatives as clearly as I can look and as closely as I can look into your eyes.
I mean, they have never heard a President of the United States say that anywhere. And
to say it on the dais on the rostrum there in the House Chamber before the assembled
Congress, I mean, at first they could not believe what they had heard.
PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON: Every device of which human ingenuity is capable,
has been used to deny this right. The *** citizen may go to register only to be told
that the day is wrong, or the hour is late, or the official in charge is absent. And if
he persists and if he manages to present himself to the registrar, he may be disqualified because
he did not spell out his middle name, or because he abbreviated a word on the application.
And if he manages to fill out an application, he is given a test. The registrar is the sole
judge of whether he passes this test. He may be asked to recite the entire Constitution,
or explain the most complex provisions of state law. And even a college degree cannot
be used to prove that he can read and write. For the fact is that the only way to pass
these barriers is to show a white skin [...] No law that we now have on the books and I have
helped to put three of them there, can ensure the right to vote when local officials are
determined to deny it.
BILL MOYERS: That speech was written by my colleague, gifted
young man -- 33 at the time, I believe --Richard Goodwin. Goodwin and Johnson created a magnificent
moment then.
GARY MAY: And as almost an accident also the first draft
of that speech had gone to another Johnson aide. And Johnson said, you gave it to a public
relations guy? I wanted Goodwin to do this. I wanted a Jew to write this speech. Someone
who had experienced anti-Semitism. And while Goodwin was working on the speech, Johnson
telephoned him and said, "You remember the story about how I was a teacher at that Mexican
American school?"
And of course Goodwin had heard it a thousand times. And Johnson's like, "I want that in
the speech."
PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON: My first job after college was as a teacher
in Cotulla, Texas, in a small Mexican-American school. Few of them could speak English, and
I couldn't speak much Spanish. My students were poor and they often came to class without
breakfast, hungry. And they knew even in their youth the pain of prejudice. They never seemed
to know why people disliked them. But they knew it was so, because I saw it in their
eyes [...] I never thought then, in 1928, that I would be standing here in 1965. It
never even occurred to me in my fondest dreams that I might have the chance to help the sons
and daughters of those students and to help people like them all over this country.
BILL MOYERS: You say that the Voting Rights Act never would
have existed without the help of two generations of courageous Republican legislators. I agree
with that because I worked with many of them when I was a young man on working on policy
for President Johnson. One of them was Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, the wizard of
ooze as you remind us.
GARY MAY: They had a very interesting relationship.
You know, very often, Dirksen would attack the President on the floor of the Senate in
the morning. And in the afternoon, they'd be drinking bourbon and branch water together.
The Voting Rights Act was literally written in Everett Dirksen's office with the Attorney
General, the acting Attorney General, Katzenbach there. And some called the Bill Dirksenbach.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah, I remember that.
GARY MAY: And Johnson, of course, was quite content
to give the credit for some of this to Everett Dirksen because he feared that the Southerners
might mount a filibuster as they had with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a long filibuster.
And in order to get the votes to invoke cloture, which would stop the filibuster, he needed
Republican votes.
BILL MOYERS: The President sent me in 1964 to see to see
Dirksen. He sent a lot of people up to see Dirksen. And I was 30 years old. And he was
68--67, 68. We talked about cloture very briefly. And then I said, "Thank you." And I got up
to leave. And I got to the door.
And he said in that deep voice of his, "Mr. Moyers, what about that great American I recommended
to the President who belongs by destiny on the Interstate Commerce Commission?" I said
"I didn't know you'd done that." He said, "You just check it out. He's a great American."
And he got on the Interstate Commerce Commission. I have to tell you that. I mean, that's the
way they both understood politics.
GARY MAY: Yes. Unfortunately, we don't have that today.
BILL MOYERS: So Justice Roberts, when he write- his opinion
on the recent gutting of the Voting Rights Act says, "We don't need it anymore." He said,
"The country has changed. This is the age of Obama. We've got our first black President."
And Justice Roberts even mentioned Bloody Sunday in Selma and the *** of those three
young people: James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner near Philadelphia, Mississippi.
And Roberts wrote, "Today, both of those towns," Selma and Philadelphia, Mississippi, "are
governed by African American mayors. Problems remain in those states," the justice said,
"but there is no denying that due to the Voting Rights Act, our nation has made great strides."
We have made great strides. What's your reaction?
GARY MAY: We certainly have made great strides. But
all we have to do is look at the voter suppression movement that arose, from many of the covered
states incidentally, in 2011 and—
BILL MOYERS: States—
GARY MAY: --2012.
BILL MOYERS: --states covered by the Voting Rights Act?
GARY MAY: Correct. Voter IDs that are very difficult
for many African Americans, and whites as well, who are elderly and don't have those
documents. It costs money to acquire these necessary documents. It's really a kind of
poll tax now. Voter IDs make it more difficult for people to vote. Preventing voting on Sunday,
which was so important to the African American community. They'd go to church. They'd go
to the polls. It's taking your soul to the polls. And all of those indicate a continuing
need for the Voting Rights Act.
BILL MOYERS: What did the Supreme Court decision actually
do?
GARY MAY: By striking down section four, which contains
the formula that allows section five to cover certain states in the South and actually nine
states -- and parts of six other states, requiring them, before changing any voting practice,
to submit those changes to a federal court in Washington, DC or the Justice Department
to receive what is called pre-clearance.
BILL MOYERS: And the reason the Voting Rights Act singled
out those states is because for decades, the voting rights of black people have been denied
by one technique after another, as President Johnson said in his speech.
And within hours of the Supreme Court's decision, the Attorney General of Texas announced that
they were going to resurrect their Voting ID bill which had been disallowed last year.
And there is an outfit Louis Menand mentions in the "New Yorker" magazine. There is a white
group in Beaumont, Texas, just waiting for this Supreme Court decision because they want
to overthrow the black majority that runs the school board. So you're saying, I think
you're saying, a lot of mischief can be done now that would have been disqualified by the
voting rights provision.
GARY MAY: Absolutely. You know, Chief Justice Warren,
when the court first ruled on the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act in 1966, said that
the bill had been designed to eliminate the most egregious of difficulties. But it was
also written to cover subtle devices. And here, I think, is an example of subtle and
quite harmful devices. We're still very polarized racially. Sometimes, it's wrong just to focus
on the fact that we have so many African Americans in office including a President. In the oral
arguments Chief Justice Roberts said, you know, well, you're saying that Alabama is
more prejudiced than Massachusetts. And the evidence indicates that yes -- it still is.
BILL MOYERS: The majority on the court struck down the
provision that requires the states to get federal approval before making changes. Is
there a historical record to suggest that this decision in no small part was motivated
by a political goal?
GARY MAY: It's hard to say. To be fair, should we accept
that maybe those five justices have their own set of political principles and we just
don't agree with them? You know, as a historian you want to be fair. But it seems to me that
they are on the wrong side of history, that there was so much evidence to indicate continuing
difficulties that to simply, blanketly say, "We need the Voting Rights Act anymore.
You know, we're in a post-racial society now. We have a black President." It is so out of
touch with what is happening in the country.
BILL MOYERS: Pardon me for suggesting that John Roberts
sometimes seems less concerned with the law and the Constitution than with a political
agenda. Is that unfair?
GARY MAY: No, it's not unfair. In fact, when he was
a young member of the civil rights division under Ronald Reagan he was at that point working
very hard when the Voting Rights Act came up for reauthorization in 1982 to gut it at
that point. So in many ways the court's recent decision is the fulfillment of Judge Roberts'
dream.
BILL MOYERS: In fact, there's a memo Roberts wrote back
then in which he said the Voting Rights Act would quote, "Provide a basis for the most
intrusive interference imaginable by federal courts into state and local processes." In
other words, "Uncle Sam, you're meddling too much. Let's get your hands off of state processes."
It's certainly consistent with Ronald Reagan's philosophy of you know, "Government is not
the solution. It's the problem." So if we just remove government from regulating corporations
and banks and everything will be fine. So that was the civil rights version of Reaganism.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in her dissent, quote, "Hubris," pride, "is a fit word for
today's demolition of the Voting Rights Act." Was it hubris?
GARY MAY: It's politics. And I think it's also ideological
hubris. Because if you go back to the critical documents that supposedly protect the right
to vote, you know, the 15th amendment passed in 1870, declares that people could not be
prohibited from voting because of race, color, and condition of previous servitude and added
the Congress shall enforce this amendment with appropriate legislation. The first of
the line 1965 Voting Rights Act says, this is a bill to enforce the 15th amendment. So
this was a power given to the Congress, not to the courts.
BILL MOYERS: The Roberts Court in effect said to Congress,
you can rewrite these standards, you can rewrite the Voting Rights Act. And it's your obligation
to do so. Any chance that this Congress would do that?
GARY MAY: It seems almost impossible because the Republican
party has become the party of the South. And in a strange way, has taken on the appearance
of the old white southern segregationist Democrats.
BILL MOYERS: Now you have analysts, and others saying the
court's recent decision is going to actually help the Democrats in the voting booth and
that it's actually going to be a spur to the energies of the Democratic party in the coming
elections. Do you see any possibility of that?
GARY MAY: I don't know because I remember-- what was
the decisive moment that turned this whole thing around, that led to the creation of
the Voting Rights Act? It was the tragedy of Bloody Sunday.
I am concerned about the future. I think the court's decision does give a green light to
all sorts of things, not simply the mischievous devices to suppress the vote. But imagine
the Supreme Court of the United States giving its endorsement of-- creating difficulties
for voting. I mean, it's extraordinary. And what comes of that? I don't know.
BILL MOYERS: You've written a book that could change this
country again, if every citizen read it. Congratulations.
GARY MAY: Thank you.
BILL MOYERS: On "Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights
Act and the Transformation of American Democracy." And thank you, Gary May, for being with me.
GARY MAY: Thank you so much.