The Wake

Like many U students, I voted for the very first time last November. While I had felt strongly about the outcome of the election, the actual voting experience didn’t strike me as particularly memorable. I went with a few friends, we waited in line, and I penciled in that little circle and handed over my ballot. But while some of us campaign for our preferred candidate and fret over the results, it’s easy to take the most important thing for granted – voting itself. At a time when registering to vote is so easy and encouraged that last fall a student could do it at a table while walking across the Washington Avenue Bridge, the “right to vote” is not something that has anyone concerned. In Minnesota, voters can register on the day of the election.

While it is certainly good this is the case, it’s important that our voting privileges don’t go unappreciated and unnoticed. Despite massive voter registration drives on college campuses last year, it was difficult to measure whether or not any significant difference was made in youth voter turnout. The American population, young and old, is fighting varying degrees of apathy when it comes to voting.

A new exhibit at the Humphrey Forum, Making Freedom’s Mark, commemorates the 40th Anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 The Exhibit is trying to affect apathy by recalling the struggle for black Americans’ voting rights in a number of southern states. The Voting Rights Act is up for renewal in 2007; if it is not renewed it would release states from the obligation to enforce fair voter registration.

The Voting Rights Act, initially adopted in 1965, when it was signed on Aug. 6 by President Lyndon Johnson, and extended in 1970, 1975, and 1982, is generally considered the most successful piece of civil rights legislation ever adopted by the United States Congress. The Act enforced the 15th Amendment’s permanent guarantee that no person shall be denied the right to vote on account of race or color.

Although the right to vote was guaranteed in the Constitution, until 1965 some states used other strategies to hinder the registration of black voters. Many southern states introduced poll taxes between 1889 and 1910. These special taxes had to be paid by every member of a community and those who failed to pay were deemed ineligible to vote. Given the extent of African-American poverty, the poll tax disenfranchised large numbers of black voters. While the Voting Rights Act didn’t include a provision prohibiting poll taxes, it directed the attorney general to challenge their use.

Literacy requirements based voter registration upon highly subjective oral and written examinations. Some states would not even permit an applicant to take the examination unless an already-registered voter would “vouch” for them. A section of the Act ended the use of literacy requirements for voting in six southern states (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia) and in many counties of North Carolina.

Election officials worked to discourage African-Americans from applying, by publishing their names in local newspapers and calling them to the attention of local white supremacists. Thus they subjected prospective black voters to possible physical and economic intimidation. Other sections of the Act authorized the Attorney General to appoint federal voting examiners who could be sent into covered areas to ensure that legally qualified people were free to register for elections, or to send federal observers to oversee the polls.

By 1965, the rest of the country was beginning to take notice of the injustices African Americans faced in the South. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, many activists turned their attention to securing voting rights in the South. During the “Freedom Summer” of 1964, groups sent over 1,000 volunteer organizers, both white and black, to help register blacks in Mississippi, a state where African-Americans comprised 45 percent of the population and only 5 percent of its registered voters.

The murder of voting-rights activists in Philadelphia, Mississippi (the subject of the movie Mississippi Burning) and other instances of violence gained national attention. Finally, when state troopers attacked peaceful marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965, the President and Congress were convinced that legal action needed to be taken. President Johnson emphasized a need for a strong voting rights law and hearings soon began on the bill that would become the Voting Rights Act.

Making Freedom’s Mark seeks to capture the spirit of this era-of-change and brings together documents, manuscripts, works of art, recordings, photographs, and artifacts from more than 30 museums, libraries, archives, courthouses, and private collections in order to represent the people and drama surrounding the voting rights movement of the mid-1960s. The exhibit features ballot boxes from Clarksdale, Mississippi and May Township, Minnesota; courthouse documents from Selma, Alabama and Indianola, Mississippi; highway signs from the Edmund Pettus Bridge; a Ku Klux Klan robe and “Colored Café” sign from Birmingham; an exchange of telegrams between President Johnson and Alabama Governor Wallace; a banner carried in this year’s August 6th march in Atlanta to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Act; and fine art from a number of collections. Several photographs from the personal collections of the men and women who traveled to Mississippi for voter registration work will also be on display, as well as personal diaries from the teachers and students who joined Freedom Schools in 1964, a project to empower local African Americans to work for change.

“This is a museum about politics, which is about words” says Steve Sandell, director of the Humphrey Forum. “Because museums are primarily about things, we’ve replaced the words with things and hopefully those things can pull at you in the same way. People died for those things.”

“We contacted the Lyndon B. Johnson Library in Boston, the Library of Congress, courthouses in Mississippi, the Minnesota Historical Society and University of Mississippi and other archives, as well as people who were actively involved in the movement in 1964 and 1965,” says Sandell. “We went to Tennessee, Mississippi, and Selma, Montgomery and Birmingham, Alabama. You can’t do the whole movement in a museum this size, but what we have all just came together.”

In addition to the formal leadership of Congress and the White House, the exhibit also focuses on the local leaders and grassroots organizations that were the backbone of the movement. “There was leadership in Washington with President Johnson, national leadership with Martin Luther King, Jr., but there was also informal leadership at the local level,” says Sandell. “It was these people who ignited the flame.”

The history and legacy of the social activism for the voting rights movement ground the exhibit and are the subjects of its focal piece – a collage of historical photos and documents on a voting curtain. While the exhibit primarily deals with history, it is still very relevant to the present and the future.

“The important thing is that young people know that the times had to change or democracy was never going to be realized,” says Sandell. “It’s especially important to know that times can still change; we can make change. Hopefully it will encourage people to recognize the spirit of democracy and the importance of individuals and their ideas.”

Making Freedom’s Mark will be on display at the Humphrey Forum from Sept. 23 to March 15, 2006. The museum is open to the public weekdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and, during the exhibit, on Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.