Please take everything off your desk except for a blue pen and a blank sheet of paper
Please take everything off your desk except for a blue pen
Harvard takes the 1964 Louisiana Literacy Test
Directions: close read with a highlighter
Discuss:
What might be intimidating or difficult in this process? How did these actions/processes impact voting of African Americans in these areas?
Voting Rights Background
15th Amendment (1870)
Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Mississippi (1950s)
45% of the population was black, yet they only represented 5% of voters. In the 1964 Presidential election, 6% of black citizens voted.
Discuss: How did this happen? What actions could states like Mississippi have taken to cause this low voting rate?
March 14
DO NOW:
Review handout for “The Voting Rights Act: 10 Things You Should Know”
Put an arrow by the tactic that was most disturbing
Put a star by the tactic that was most inspiring
Agenda:
Voting Rights Act
Selma background
Selma viewing
Essential Question: To what extent has the federal government been successful in protecting the voting rights of its people?
“The Voting Rights Act: 10 Things You Should Know”: tinyurl.com/zrybqbf
Essential Question: To what extent has the federal government been successful in protecting the voting rights of its people?
In groups of 3, share your thoughts about tactics used to suppress or fight for the right to vote
Which were disturbing?
Which were inspiring?
What information was new or surprising to you?
How does this shift your view of the federal government? Of democracy?
Four emerging categories
Terrorism/Violent intimidation
Legal Barriers
Grassroots Organizing
Legal Gains
As you watch, provide examples within each of the categories
Selma - What do you know?
SNCC: Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
SCLC: Southern Christian Leadership Conference
The Selma voting rights campaign started long before the modern Civil Rights Movement.
Mrs. Amelia Boynton Robinson, and other African American activists founded the Dallas County Voters League (DCVL) in the 1930s.
The DCVL became the base for a group of activists who pursued voting rights and economic independence.
Though civil rights activists typically used nonviolent tactics in public demonstrations, at home and in their own communities they consistently used weapons to defend themselves.
On June 12, 1963, the night Medgar Evers was assassinated in Jackson, Mississippi, whites viciously attacked Bernard Lafayette outside his apartment in Selma in what many believe was a coordinated effort to suppress Black activism.
Lafayette believed in nonviolence, but his life was probably saved by a neighbor who shot into the air to scare away the white attackers.
This practice of armed self-defense was woven into the movement and, because neither local nor federal law enforcement offered sufficient protection, it was essential for keeping nonviolent activists alive.
SNNC in Selma
Selma was one of the communities where the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) began organizing in the early 1960s.
In 1963, seasoned activists Colia (Liddell) and Bernard Lafayette came to
Selma as field staff for SNCC, “Snick.” Founded by the young people who
initiated the 1960sit-in movement, SNCC had moved into Deep South,
majority-black communities doing the dangerous work of organizing
with local residents around voter registration.
Held Citizenship School classes focused on the literacy test required for
voter registration and canvassed door-to-door, encouraging African Americans to try to register to vote.
SNCC developed creative tactics to highlight Black demand for the vote and the raw violence at the heart of Jim Crow.
To highlight African Americans’ desire to vote and encourage a sense of collective struggle, SNCC organized a Freedom Day on Monday, Oct. 7, 1963, one of the monthly registration days. They invited Black celebrities, like James Baldwin and Dick Gregory, so Blacks in Selma would know they weren’t alone.
Selma
Selma activists invited Dr. King to join an active movement with a long history.
Youth and teachers played a significant role in the Selma Movement.
“What impressed me most about the day that the teachers marched was just the idea of them being there. Prior to their marching, I used to have to go to school and it was like a report, you know. They were just as afraid as my parents were, because they could lose their jobs. It was amazing to see how many teachers participated. They follow[ed] us that day. It was just a thrill.” - Sheyann Webb, 8 years old and frequent participant in the marches
Women were central to the movement, but they were sometimes pushed to the side and today their contributions are often overlooked.
Mrs. Amelia Boynton was a stalwart with the DCVL and played a critical role for decades in nurturing African American efforts to register to vote. She welcomed SNCC to town and helped support the younger activists and their work. When Judge Hare’s injunction slowed the grassroots organizing, she initiated the invitation to King and SCLC.
Diane Nash whose plan for a nonviolent war on Montgomery inspired the initial Selma march, was already a seasoned veteran, leading the Nashville sit-ins, helping found SNCC, and taking decisive action to carry the freedom rides forward.
Selma
Though President Lyndon Johnson is typically credited with passage of the Voting Rights Act, the Movement forced the issue and made it happen.
The Selma campaign is considered a major success for the Civil Rights Movement, largely because it was an immediate catalyst for the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on Aug. 6, 1965, the Voting Rights Act guaranteed active federal protection of Southern African Americans’ right to vote.
Although Johnson did support the Voting Rights Act, the critical push for the legislation came from the movement itself. SNCC’s community organizing of rural African Americans, especially in Mississippi, made it increasingly difficult for the country to ignore the pervasive, violent, and official white opposition to Black voting and African American demands for full citizenship.
From “10 Things You Should Know about Selma Before You See the Film” by Emilye Crosby, published on Zinn Education Project
March 18, 2016
DO NOW:
GET YOUR SELMA ORGANIZER.
SHARE ONE OF YOUR NOTES WITH A PARTNER.
CONTRIBUTE HENNY PENNIES to the BIN!
AGENDA:
Sweepstakes
SELMA
Voting Rights Act
Selma Debrief…in writing
What are your reactions to the film?
What emotions came up for you? What was difficult to watch?
What inspired you? What tactics were most impactful to you?
How does this film challenge your definition of democracy?
March 29, 2016
DO NOW:
What are you looking forward to during these last 10 weeks of SCHOOL?!
When you are finished, please get your “Voting Rights Act” Background Handout.
Voting Rights Act
Background/Part I
Parts 2 and 3
Reviewing the Voting Rights Act
If it were the year 1967, for each situation,
Situation #1
A state that had 40% of eligible voters registered in the 1964 election wants to change the times voting is allowed.
Situation #2
A county wants to require voters to show a specific form of photo identification (driver’s license, college identification card or passport only) to be able to vote in school board elections.
Situation #3
A state had only 45% of citizens eligible to vote participate in the 1964 election. They held a state-wide vote to move to a vote by mail system and are going to implement it right now.
Situation #1: Key
*Sections 4 & 5 – less than 50% of eligible voters were registered, so if the state wants to change an election practice, they must have it approved ahead of time, before it begins.
Situation #2: Key
*Section 2 – this could potentially discriminate against specific groups who might not have one of those three forms of identification. Even if this is unintended discrimination, if the result harms a specific group, there is a problem. A 90 year old citizen might not be driving, or need a passport, or go to college.
Situation #3: Key
*Sections 4 & 5- less than 50% of eligible voters were registered, so if the state wants to change an election practice, they must have it approved ahead of time, before it begins.
For Part 2 and 3
Current voter participation in the South for 2016 primaries:
In groups of 3, imagine you have a younger sibling (in 3rd grade) who is starting to pay attention to the American voting process and wants to know why so many people who could vote either can’t or don’t. Your task is to translate this information into language that a 3rd grader can understand. You must cover these essential questions:
What changed with the Voting Rights Act as a result of the SC ruling?
Quotations from Supreme Court Cases
The VRA has been challenged multiple times through the Judicial Branch. Here are some quotes from cases.
“[The] Framers of the Constitution intended the States to keep for themselves, as provided in the Tenth Amendment, the power to regulate elections.”
Gregory v. Ashcroft (1991).
Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 “to banish the blight of racial discrimination in voting, which ha[d] infected the electoral process in parts of our country for nearly a century.”
South Carolina v. Katzenbach (1966).
Congress had found that case-by-case litigation was inadequate to combat wide-spread and persistent discrimination in voting, because of the inordinate amount of time and energy required to overcome the obstructionist tactics invariably encountered in these lawsuits. After enduring nearly a century of systematic resistance to the Fifteenth Amendment, Congress might well decide to shift the advantage of time and inertia from the perpetrators of the evil to its victims.
South Carolina v. Katzenbach, (1966).
Past or Present??
Gerrymandering
Gerrymandering
March 31st!
Please get your materials ready for the
Voting Rights Act Assessment and wait for instructions
Agenda:
Work Time
Vocab Activity
Homework
April 4th, 2016
Do Now:
Use the map on the following slide to-
Make an observation
Make an inference
Ask a question
Essential Questions:
Agenda:
The New Jim Crow: Vocab
Work with a few people around you and come up with a working definition/explanation of the following vocabulary terms.
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
Start by marking up this text:
In the margins, justify your selections. You may mark up several possibilities as you read, but you must decide which is the most significant and why