March 10, 2013

March to Protect Vote:
Challenge to Preserve Section 5 of Voting Rights Act

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from the Richmond Free Press

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - “We will never give up or give in.”

Congressman John Lewis made that vow as he and Vice President Joe Biden led 5,000 people across Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge to re-enact “Bloody Sunday,” the heroic, historymaking voting rights march that the Georgia Democrat headed 48 years ago.

In March 1965, the youthful John Lewis and others were nearly beaten to death when Alabama state troopers brutally attacked peaceful freedom marchers as they crossed the bridge on the way to the state capital in Montgomery.

That attack galvanized the Civil Rights Movement and pushed Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act the same year, finally opening Southern polling places to millions of African-Americans and bringing an end to all-white rule.

Congressman Lewis used Sunday’s pilgrimage across the bridge to call for new determination to uphold the hard-won law. Biden, the first sitting vice president to participate in the annual re-enactment, joined in that call. He said nothing shaped his consciousness in 1965 more than watching TV footage of the police assault on Congressman Lewis and the other marchers for daring to seek the right to vote.

“We saw in stark relief the rank hatred, discrimination and violence that still existed in large parts of the nation,” he said in recalling the horror he watched.

While those 1965 marchers “broke the back of the forces of evil,” the vice president said that challenges to voting rights continue in the largely Republican-backed push to restrict early voting and voter registration drives and the enactment of voter ID laws where no voter fraud has been shown.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson said Sunday’s event had a sense of urgency because the U.S. Supreme Court had just heard a request from a mostly white Alabama county to strike down a key portion of the Voting Rights Act.

“We’ve had the right to vote 48 years, but they’ve never stopped trying to diminish the impact of the votes,” said Rev. Jackson before taking part in the march. Referring to the Voting Rights Act, another veteran civil rights leader, the Rev. Al Sharpton, said: “We are not here for a commemoration. We are here for a continuation.”

One surprising participant in the march was archconservative House Majority Leader Eric I. Cantor, R-Henrico, who said he was “proud to march alongside Congressman Lewis, who courageously paved the way for a better life for future generations.”

A supporter of many of the new restrictions such as voter ID, Congressman Cantor also has been a supporter of the Voting Rights Act. He joined Congressman Lewis in voting to renew the act in 2006, and last year Congressman Cantor pushed to have the House historian collect video testimony from Congressman Lewis and other congressional participants in the voting march to create a record of their experiences.

The march was held just four days after the Voting Rights Act came under scrutiny from the Supreme Court. Alabama’s Shelby County is asking the court to throw out Section 5 of the act, the requirement that federal approval be sought for election law changes in Alabama and Virginia and seven other states

with histories of suppressing the African-American vote.

Attorney General Eric Holder, the defendant in Shelby County’s suit, told marchers that the South is far different than it was in 1965 but is not yet at the point where the most important part of the Voting Rights Act can be dismissed as unnecessary. Rev. Jackson decried the attempt to throw out Section 5, which he called the key enforcement mechanism to protect voting rights.

“An unenforced law is no law,” the Rev. Jackson said in expressing concern that the Supreme Court could do “something terribly damaging to democracy” when it decides the case.

He predicted that if Section 5 is lost, the South would employ more gerrymandering and at-large voting to dilute the African-American vote.