Sixty Years Since Bloody Sunday

The struggle for universal and equal rights means fighting for a democratic constitution. By Luke Pickrell

Monument depicting water hoses blasting civil rights activists during SCLC’s 1963 Birmingham campaign.

On March 7, 1965, nearly 600 civil rights marchers headed out of Selma on U.S. Highway 80 toward Montgomery. The march, part of a broader voting rights movement underway in Selma and throughout the South, was led by 25-year-old John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Reverend Hosea Williams of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The protest went according to plan until the marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where they encountered a wall of Alabama state troopers waiting for them on the other side.

The troopers viciously attacked the marchers, beating them with nightsticks, firing tear gas, and charging them on horseback during a day of violence later known as “Bloody Sunday.” Amelia Boynton, who had helped organize the march, was beaten unconscious. A photograph of her lying on the road appeared on the front page of newspapers and magazines around the world. Lewis suffered a skull fracture and bore scars on his head from the incident for the rest of his life. “I don’t see how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam — I don’t see how he can send troops to the Congo — I don’t see how he can send troops to Africa and can’t send troops to Selma,” he said after the attack. Martin Luther King Jr. made a similar point, decrying the fact that “millions of dollars can be spent every day to hold troops in South Viet Nam and our country cannot protect the rights of Negroes in Selma.”

On August 6, in the presence of King and other civil rights leaders, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965, which established that “no voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” The act also devised a process known as “preclearance,” in which states with a history of voter discrimination (as judged by a “coverage formula”) were required to seek pre-approval from the Attorney General before making changes to their voting or election practices.

In 2006, the VRA was extended for another 25 years. But seven years later, in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court ignored Congress’ reauthorization and popular support for voting rights and concluded that the preclearance requirement was no longer necessary.

The ruling had immediate and devastating consequences. “In the wake of the decision,” noted Levitsky and Ziblatt in Tyranny of the Minority, “states and counties previously subject to federal supervision aggressively purged their voter rolls and closed hundreds of polling stations, particularly in Black neighborhoods. And in the eight years that followed the Shelby ruling, twenty-six states — including ten that had previously been subject to federal government preclearance — passed restrictive voting laws, many of which disproportionately affected nonwhite voters.” John Lewis called the ruling a “dagger in the heart of the Voting Rights Act.” The Supreme Court’s ruling, argue Levitsky and Ziblatt, “makes plain a simple fact: many of America’s venerated political institutions are not very democratic; indeed, they were not made for democracy.”

On the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, many civil rights groups are calling for Congress to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (H.R. 4), which would restore and strengthen parts of the VRA, including the preclearance requirement. Democracy Now! noted a sense of urgency surrounding the bill “at a time when voting rights are facing unprecedented federal threats.”

But so far, H.R. 4 hasn’t been able to escape the Constitution’s legislative meat grinder. The bill died in committee in 2014 and 2015. In 2019, the Republican-controlled Senate refused to hold a vote or even allow a floor debate on the bill. Thanks to the unchangeable one-state, two-senator rule (a flagrant denial of equal suffrage), the Senate majority that blocked the bill represented seven million fewer voters than the minority that backed it.

Lewis died in 2020 with the VRA still in shambles. In 2021, the bill passed the House but was filibustered in the Senate after failing to receive 60 votes in favor. It was blocked again in 2022 after an attempt to change the Senate rules was stopped by just two dissenting Democrats. Polls at the time showed that 63 percent of Americans supported the bill and “solid majorities” were in favor of expanded access to early and mail-in voting, greater access to same-day registration, and limits on gerrymandering. But the Senate continues to stop all of that from happening.

The U.S. has never been a democracy based on one person, one equal vote. The imperial presidency, with its king-like power of executive order and the onerous impeachment clause; the unelected federal judiciary, which serves for life and abolishes decades of progress through judicial review; the malapportioned Senate, which makes a mockery of equal suffrage and ensured that John Lewis died with a broken heart; the gerrymandered House, which no honest person could call representative — it’s clear that the existing political system won’t protect the few civil rights that still exist. In fact, the current system is tearing those rights to pieces.

Instead of clinging to the undemocratic constitution in the hope that checks and balances will make things right, we must fight for a democratic political system based on universal and equal rights in which political power lies in the hands of the majority. Democracy is our only hope. Sixty years since Bloody Sunday, the struggle for universal and equal rights — the struggle for a world in which all people are equal — means fighting for a new constitution.