When America Became a Democracy

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 finally delivered on the stated ideals of this country. Now it hangs by a thread.

- By Vann R. Newkirk II

To My Mother

You were born on July 9, 1964, in Greenwood, Mississippi, delivered into the cradle of white supremacy. Listening to the stories of terror and hope woven into the story of your birth used to frighten me. The year before you entered the world, white supremacists were blocking food aid to Greenwood, trying to starve Black sharecroppers who were demanding their civil rights. You were carried home in the middle of Freedom Summer, right down the street from where Fannie Lou Hamer led a movement that included your neighbors and cousins to demand self-determination. You suckled and wailed, oblivious to your membership in the final group of Black babies born under Jim Crow. There were many such children, born just on the wrong edge of the fight for freedom. But only one of them was my mama.

The marrow of your bones carried generations of struggle, and a year after your birth, that struggle helped bring forth something new. Acceding to the demands of your kin in Mississippi and of many others, President Lyndon B. Johnson and the white folks up in Washington passed the Voting Rights Act. The signing ceremony was in August 1965, just a month after your first birthday. Nobody knew exactly how the act would work, or what would happen when federal agents came down to the state to try to enforce it. But the local paper made things plain and simple: “President Signs Voting Law Declaring That Negroes Free.”