The Christian Recorder - Reflecting on the 1965 Voting Rights Act by Bishop Adam J. Richardson, Jr.

Adam J. Richardson, Jr., 115 Senior Bishop, Retired The 60th anniversary of the signing of the Voting Rights Act, signed by Texan, Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th president of the United States. The date was August 6, 1965. It was particularly important to me and members of my high school graduation class. The seminal policy appeared only days after my classmates and I heard our names called as we marched in, out and across the stage at the D. B. McKay Auditorium amid pomp and circumstance on the campus of the University of Tampa.    It had only been about 60 days since activist protesters emerged from the stately sanctuary of the Brown Chapel AME Church of Selma resolutely determined to cross the Edmond Pettus Bridge, en route to the Alabama state Capitol in Montgomery. It was a first Sunday; Brown Chapel congregants would have knelt at the chancel rail to receive the blessed sacrament of Holy Communion. March 7, 1965 would henceforth be known as Bloody Sunday. The 1965 Voting Rights Act would symbolically be signed with the “blood of the slaughtered.”    Only a month later, my high school classmates and I would be commencing the next phase of our young adult lives. However, none of us could vote. In fact, some of our classmates missed the ceremony altogether because they had already reported for military duty, preparing to join that caravan of soldiers [young, gifted and Black], en route to the killing fields of Viet Nam. It would be another six years before any of us could vote. We were young, reasonably intelligent, hopeful, but in the eyes of government policy makers, we were also expendable.    As an 18 year old, I was mandated to register for the draft. It required of me to possibly go to war without the benefit of the franchise. My contemporaries and I were expected to pledge an oath to the Constitution, potentially sacrifice life and limb, possibly pay the ultimate price for a country in which we had few rights (not even to buy a hot dog and a coke and consume it at a table in a restaurant or the counter at a 5 and dime store). At 18, we could go to war, but could not vote for the old men who were sending us there. We were the correct age, color, height and weight for body bags.  The mantra came to be "old enough to fight, old enough to vote."   It would not be until the passage of the 26th Amendment that lowered the voting age to 18 years. It would be an extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, signed by President Richard M. Nixon on July 1, 1971. By then, I would have graduated from college, gotten married and was well on my way to fatherhood before I was eligible to vote.    For the quadrennium I had been in college, I had gratefully received academic deferments. However, I was seeing in real time what the draft was doing to several promising young men at FAMU (probably emblematic of other HBCUs around the country). Fellow AME member, and president of the Student Government Association, Spencer Albert, and Calvin Norman, Boy Scout troop leader at Allen Temple AME in Tampa, editor of the FAMU student paper were drafted during the school term. They dutifully reported. Fortunately, Spencer Albert made it home and eventually completed his studies. Calvin Norman did not. He was killed by a bombing attack as he performed clerical duties behind the frontline. Except for student elections on campus, neither of them had seen the inside of a voting booth.   After a few days of classes at the Interdenominational Theological Center in pursuit of graduate level theological studies, I received a letter from the draft board in Tampa. My deferments had been revoked; my number had come up. I was ordered to report to a site in Tampa, join a group of other young men who had the misfortune of hitting the draft lottery, to take our physical exams and possible induction. I asked the draft board to allow me to report to a site in the vicinity of Atlanta, inasmuch as it would be a hardship to get to Tampa, in order to catch a bus back to Gainesville, for the physical and to take the battery of tests to determine my fitness for military service. The board was considerate; I reported to a military installation in Atlanta.    Years later, 1991, en route to Singapore to attend the 16th World Methodist Conference, the pilot of our wide-bodied aircraft, invited us to look out of the windows on the right side to get a glimpse of the coast of Viet Nam. I went to the galley of the plane, looked out and proceeded to memorialize friends and schoolmates who had given the ultimate sacrifice for a country who only expected from them obedience to the chain of command, complete fealty, bravery, and blood if necessary. They had not, could not, vote.   Sixty years later, we are seeing vestiges of a time we assumed was passé. Current national leaders speak of rigged elections; others claim to be protecting and defending democracy. State legislators have left the Texas Capitol to prevent the GOP from having a quorum to vote on a new map for the state of Texas.   Six decades has not been sufficient time to give us immunity  from the struggle to preserve the right to vote. Frederick Douglass and others still remind us from the grave that “Eternal vigilance is the price we must pay for liberty.”  Today, we are witnessing further erosion of the Voting Rights Act. At the insistence of President Trump, we saw the Supreme Court, lead by Chief Justice Roberts, gut the Voting Rights Act, eliminating key provisions. Under the mantra to “Make America Great Again,” legislators are choosing their voters, rather than voters choosing their elected officials. Gerrymandering is the tool of choice. Most pundits are in agreement, that it’s only a matter of time before this gerrymander strategy will work. In Texas, Democrats are trying to avoid giving the Republicans a quorum to vote on the new voting map. Democrats left the state, holed up in a hotel in Illinois — until the threat of a bomb. This is serious. Texas Governor, Greg Abbott, ordered officers to “locate, arrest, and return Democrats” to Texas. He has ordered the Texas Rangers to investigate lawmakers for “potential bribery” and anyone who might have aided and abetted their effort.    Voting has been dubbed the most important right of citizenship. It is the reason the right to vote was withheld for so long. At its core, voting is an indication of equality. Elections have consequences. Sometimes the lessons come hard and the tuition is expensive. So it is in this moment in time.

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