Deuel Ross, Fried Frank Fellow for the NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund, will talk about the 1965 Voting Rights Act on Wed., Jan. 28, at 3:30 p.m. in the UC Hamilton Room. This is UWW’s 29th annual Martin Luther King Commemorative Event, and it’s also part of the campus Conversation on Race.
The Voting Rights Act was enacted fifty years ago, signed by President Lyndon Baines Johnson on August 6, 1965. Learn more about the history of this legislation at the web site of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Dept. of Justice. Read the legislation (Public Law 89-110) online, courtesy of the House Library (U.S. Congress. House of Representatives). You also can read online President Johnson’s speech at a televised joint session of the Congress on March 15, 1965 called “The American Promise,” delivered in the week following the violent “Bloody Sunday” attack on civil rights marchers that also had been televised to the American public. Included in the speech are these lines:
There is no constitutional issue here. The command of the Constitution is plain.
There is no moral issue. It is wrong–deadly wrong–to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country.
There is no issue of States rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights.
You can watch President Johnson giving the speech on YouTube:
[youtube]http://youtu.be/5NvPhiuGZ6I[/youtube]
Andersen Library also has resources for digging deeper, such as the books The politics of disenfranchisement: Why is it so hard to vote in America? (3rd-floor Main Collection, JK1976 .S355 2010), Quiet revolution in the South: The impact of the Voting Rights Act, 1965-1990 (3rd-floor Main Collection, JK1929.A2 Q54 1994), and Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (3rd-floor Main Collection, JK1929 .A2 G37). There also are articles such as “Formulating Voting Rights Act Remedies to Address Current Conditions” (American Politics Research, 2014, vol.42:no.3, pp.376-408).
Please ask a librarian for assistance in finding information.
Andersen Library is a federal and Wisconsin depository library with federal and state government documents on a variety of current and relevant issues available to you in various formats (print, DVD/CD-ROM, online). Check out your government at Andersen Library!
