Here’s How the Biden Administration Can Still Make Progress on Voting Rights
March 7, 1965, was the apotheosis of the civil rights movement. The brutality of slavery, the collective trauma of the Civil War, and the oppression of Blacks in the South all met on the concrete of Edmund Pettus Bridge as activists marched for the right to vote.
Though lacking guns and bullets, the young revolutionaries led by John Lewis and the Rev. Hosea Williams marched, carrying with them the weapon of conviction. In the face of the zeitgeist of the 1960s—which held that the federal government shouldn’t enact legal protections for Black voters in the South—these civil rights activists were undeterred and refused to back down.
They believed that the dream of a multi-racial democracy—proclaimed by a Baptist pastor from Georgia on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial less than two years earlier—could, and should, become reality.