Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee veteran and Algebra Project founder Bob Moses was invited to speak at the 2016 Democratic Party platform hearing on June 18, 2016 about voting rights. He delivered testimony on behalf of the SNCC Legacy Project.

The SNCC Legacy Project statement provides historical context and calls for a Constitutional amendment prohibiting infringement of full voting rights. View the full testimony on the video clip below. Moses is introduced by Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Maryland). Following the testimony, Moses responds to questions from Cummings, Cornel West, and others.

Here is an excerpt from the testimony:

Black youth dropped the curtain on this second Constitutional Era; they initiated and sustained the Sit-In Movement, took it across Alabama and into Mississippi with Freedom Rides, then settled via SNCC across Mississippi and the black belt to organize an earned insurgency for the right to vote. They acted as Constitutional People, citizens of the nation, in defiance of the Supreme Court’s Confederate Narrative and its idea that their human rights depended on something as shaky as the laws of the Confederate States. A notion as absurd as slavery itself. They enacted a People’s Narrative, a story involving guarantees of national citizenship and national protection of citizens’ rights.

In this, our third constitutional era, our questions remain:

Who are the constitutional people?

What does it mean to be a constitutional person in the United States of America?

While those who fought for the Reconstruction Amendments thought they were guaranteeing the right to vote to all citizens, those rights have been deeply undermined by, among others, this Democratic Party.

Read the full statement on the CRMvet.org website here.

 

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Related Resources

One Person, One Vote website. Historical materials, profiles, timeline, map, and stories on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) voting rights organizing.

Lessons, books, and films from our Zinn Education Project website for teaching about the:

♦ history of the U.S. Constitution

♦ modern Civil Rights Movement

 

Here are links to the readings for A Documents-Based Lesson on the Voting Rights Act: A Case Study of SNCC’s Work in Lowndes County and the Emergence of Black Power. We recommend printing the student readings to have as a reference as you read the lesson description. We have only included the text readings, not the video clips. The Additional Resources lists for students and teachers are optional.

Required: Students Readings

1. Ella Baker, “Bigger than a Hamburger,” delivered in April 1960 and published in The Southern Patriot, June 1960.

2. Atlanta Students, “An Appeal for Human Rights,” The Atlanta Constitution, March 9, 1960.

3. John Lewis and SNCC, Speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Aug. 1963.

4. John Hulett, “How the Black Panther Party Was Organized,” May 23, 1966.

5. Stokely Carmichael readings, 1966-67.

a. Carmichael with Charles Hamilton, “Black Belt Election: A New Day A’Coming” excerpted from Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Vintage, 1967), reprinted in The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader, ed. by Clayborne Carson, et al. (New York: Penguin, 1991), pp. 262-68.

b. Stokely Carmichael, “What We Want,” Sept. 1966 in New York Review of Booksexcerpt published in The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader ed. by Carson, pp. 282-86.

6. Courtland Cox, “What Would It Profit a Man?” 1966.

7. SNCC Political Education Materials, created for Lowndes County in 1965-67 by SNCC staffers Courtland Cox and Jennifer Lawson. “One Man, One Vote: Is this the party you want? Or is this?,” “Us Colored People,” Sheriff, Tax Assessor, Coroner, and Board of Education.

8. Jack Minnis, “Lowndes County Freedom Organization: The Story of the Development of an Independent Political Movement on the County Level,” 1967.

9. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, “A Story Too Often Untold,” in Bridges: The Story of the Voting Rights Struggle in Selma & the Black Belt ed. Connie Tucker (Selma, AL: Imani Press, 2015), pp. 104-7.

10. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, on “freedom rights” and “freedom politics,” excerpts from Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in the Alabama Black Belt (New York: New York University Press, 2010), pp. 4, 8, 177.

 

Optional: Additional Resources For Students

1. “The Lowndes County Freedom Organization, 1965-66: ‘Vote for the Panther, Then Go Home,’” in Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s ed. by Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer (New York: Bantam, 1990), 267-82.

2. ‘Ordinary People’: Alabama and the Lowndes County Freedom Organization,” in A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC ed. by Cheryl Lynn Greenberg (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 87-109.

3. Gloria House, “We’ll Never Turn Back,” in Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC (Urbana: University of Illinois press, 2010), 503-514

4. Emilye Crosby, “The Selma Voting Rights Struggle: 15 Key Points from Bottom-Up History and Why It Matters Today,” Teaching for Change.

5. Emilye Crosby and Judy Richardson, “The Voting Rights Act: Beyond the Headlines: Twelve Things You Should Know,” Teaching for Change.

 

Optional: Additional Resources for Teachers

1. Charles Payne on “the master narrative” excerpted from Charles Payne, “The View from the Trenches,” in Debating the Civil Rights Movement by Steven F. Lawson and Charles Payne (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998, 2006).

2. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, “SNCC, Black Power, and Independent Political Party Organizing in Alabama, 1964-1966,” Journal of African American History (Winter 2006), 171-93.

3. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, “Remaking History: Barack Obama, Political Cartoons, and the Civil Rights Movement,” in Civil Rights History from the Ground Up ed. by Emilye Crosby (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 259-77.

4. Emilye Crosby, “‘This nonviolent stuff ain’t no good. It’ll get ya killed.’: Teaching about Self-Defense in the African-American Freedom Struggle,” in Teaching the Civil Rights Movement eds. Julie Buckner, Houston Roberson, Rhonda Y. Williams, Susan Holt (New York: Routledge, 2002), 159-73.

5. Emilye Crosby, excerpt from “Conclusion: ‘Doesn’t everybody want to grow up to be Ella Baker?’ Teaching Movement History” in Civil Rights History from the Ground Up: Local Struggles, a National Movement, pp. 455-61.

6. Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (New York: Scribner, 2003), chapters 20-23 (on Lowndes County, being elected SNCC chair, the Meredith March, and Black Power).

7. Northern connections.

For teachers interested in comparing the issues in the South with those in the North after the CRA and VRA, a good place to start is “Beyond Dixie: The Black Freedom Struggle Outside the South” in The Organization of American Historians Magazine of History, vol. 26, no. 1 (Jan. 2012). See also, “Black Power” in The Organization of American Historians Magazine of History, vol. 22, no. 3 (July 2008).

8. Contemporary connections.

For teachers interested in making connections to contemporary issues, a good place to start would be with Ta-Nehisi Coates’s essay, “The Case for Reparations,” which explores the structural basis of housing discrimination and its contemporary impact. ProPublica’s series on school segregation, which also looks at housing, is another very helpful resource for exploring the historic roots of today’s segregation. Teachers can use these materials to help students understand both the importance and the limitations of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in African Americans’ pursuit of equality.

In addition, The House We Live In, the third episode in Race: The Power of an Illusion, provides an excellent introduction to the ways structural inequality is built into our society. A brief introduction is available in the trailer.

Nick Kotz’s review of Ira Katznelson’s When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America, provides a brief, but helpful, overview of how New Deal programs and the GI Bill disproportionately benefited whites. (New York Times, Aug. 28, 2005)

The New York Times editorial, “How Segregation Destroys Black Wealth,” points to the persistent and far-reaching problems associated with housing segregation and discrimination. (New York Times, Sept. 15, 2015)

9. Key Dates

Here is a selective list of dates specifically related to the assigned readings and key events in this assignment.

This text is provided as background information for A Documents-Based Lesson on the Voting Rights Act: A Case Study of SNCC’s work in Lowndes County and the Emergence of Black Power by Emilye Crosby.

The Civil Rights Movement utilized a range of tactics to address different problems. For example, nonviolent direct action was critical in challenging segregation in public accommodations. Direct action disrupted the status quo and made it difficult for those in power to ignore the issue of segregation. The best examples are the sit-ins and freedom rides. In some cases, the sit-ins led to immediate changes in local policy and widespread direct action protests eventually led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which banned segregation in public accommodations). The freedom rides forced the Kennedy administration and the FCC to actually enforce two Supreme Court decisions (regarding interstate travel) that were being ignored by white southerners.

However, direct action was not particularly effective for addressing the denial of voting rights. To tackle this, SNCC organizers and their local allies used the much less visible approach of canvassing–going door-to-door meeting and talking to people. They built relationships, gave people a chance to practice voting applications, and provided transportation and support for those ready to try. They supplemented their canvassing with mass meetings and with Citizenship Education classes that helped people learn to pass the literacy tests (intended to prevent Blacks from voting) and political education workshops that introduced people to relevant laws and the duties of elected officials. These various educational efforts organized by the movement helped people increase their general understanding of citizenship and government and gave them an opportunity to develop their leadership skills. All of this work was slow, painstaking, and initially had few tangible successes. Until the passage of the Voting Rights Act, even when people tried to register, they were most often rejected and had little recourse.

Political context for the formation of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO)

Almost all white southerners in the 1960s were Democrats because their ancestors equated the Republican Party with the Emancipation of slaves and with the Radical Republicans who advocated for full citizenship for Freedpeople following the Civil War. (The meaning of Radical Republican has changed drastically.)

Before the Voting Rights Act, the Democratic Party in the South was explicitly affiliated with white supremacy. When the Mississippi Democratic Party used violence to take power in Mississippi in 1875 and overthrow the alliance of Radical Republicans and Freedpeople, it called itself the “The White Man’s Party.” In Alabama in 1965 and 1966, the state Democratic Party’s slogan was “White Supremacy for the Right.” In the 1960s, the national Democratic Party was split between southern segregationists and New Deal Democrats who were more liberal on race. Southern Democrats, known as Dixiecrats, did everything they could to undermine civil rights. However, even the liberal wing of the national Democratic Party had a mixed record on civil rights. During the 1964 Democratic Convention, for example, when SNCC and others organized the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to challenge the state of Mississippi’s white supremacist “regular” party delegation, instead of supporting the Freedom Democrats, Lyndon Johnson used the FBI to spy on the challengers and exerted considerable pressure to defeat their bid to be seated. He did this, with the support of other liberal democrats, despite considerable evidence that the “Regular” Democrats actively disfranchised African Americans, even to the point of using violent repression. The Republican Party was also split at the national level. The Barry Goldwater wing of the Republican Party was opposed to civil rights legislation, for example, while progressive Republicans were strong supporters. John Lewis references these national divisions when he delivered SNCC’s March on Washington speech,

For the party of [John F.] Kennedy is also the party of [James O.] Eastland. The party of [Jacob] Javits is also the party of Goldwater. Where is our party? Where is the political party that will make it unnecessary to march on Washington? Where is the political party that will make it unnecessary to march in the streets of Birmingham? Where is the political party that will protect the citizens of Albany, Georgia? (See John Lewis and SNCC’s March on Washington speech.)

In broad daylight, Thomas Coleman, a member of an elite white family in Lowndes, attacked a group of activists, shooting and killing Jonathan Daniels and critically injuring Richard Morrisroe, both white activists. Coleman was quickly acquitted by an all-white jury that accepted his claim of self-defense. The fact that the activists were released from jail suddenly, for no apparent reason, suggests that Coleman was acting as part of a wider conspiracy. This is just the most dramatic of the many ways the white elite used violence and misused the legal system in an effort to sustain their authority and advantages.