{"id":9800,"date":"2020-07-19T20:24:13","date_gmt":"2020-07-20T00:24:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.statutesandstories.com\/blog_html\/?p=9800"},"modified":"2020-10-01T14:15:58","modified_gmt":"2020-10-01T18:15:58","slug":"john-lewis-and-the-voting-rights-act-of-1965-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.statutesandstories.com\/blog_html\/john-lewis-and-the-voting-rights-act-of-1965-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"John Lewis and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Lewis and the Civil Rights Act of 1964<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The nation lost a beloved civil rights icon with the recent passing of Congressman John Lewis. Lewis was engaged in nearly all of the pivotal events in the civil rights movement: the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins in 1960, the Freedom Rides in 1961, the March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream Speech<\/em> in 1963, the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964, and the Bloody Sunday march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965. Perhaps his proudest achievement was the adoption of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (the “VRA”), which built upon the Civil Rights Act of 1964.<\/p>\n

The VRA of 1965 was one of the most effective civil rights laws in American history and arguably one of the most consequential laws ever passed by Congress. This two-part post attempts to recount the story of John Lewis’ struggle for the adoption of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. We are only beginning to understand the debt of gratitude that is owed to John Lewis and his allies who were not afraid to get into “good trouble, necessary trouble.”<\/p>\n

Part I of this post discusses Lewis’ civil rights legacy leading into the historic March on Washington in 1963, his meeting with President Kennedy and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Part II<\/strong> <\/a><\/span>\u00a0continues with a discussion of Bloody Sunday and the adoption of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It was not by accident that the Voting Rights Act was introduced by President Johnson a week after John Lewis led the historic march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where he was almost killed by the Selma Police.<\/p>\n

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John Lewis was the son of sharecroppers, born into a family of ten children in rural Alabama. In 1957 he wrote to Dr. Martin Luther King and was invited to visit MLK in Montgomery.<\/p>\n

Nashville Sit In Movement<\/em><\/p>\n

As a student, Lewis organized sit-ins in segregated lunch counters in Nashville, resulting in his first arrest. The Nashville sit-ins were among the earliest direct action campaigns targeting racial segregation in the South.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As described by David Halberstam, then a reporter for The Nashville Tennessean:<\/span><\/em><\/a><\/span>\u00a0<\/p>\n

The protests had been conducted with exceptional dignity, and gradually one image had come to prevail \u2014 that of elegant, courteous young Black people, holding to their Gandhian principles, seeking the most elemental of rights, while being assaulted by young white hoodlums who beat them up and on occasion extinguished cigarettes on their bodies.<\/p>\n