We've come to the end of a remarkable journey. In the early 1960s, most Southern blacks were barred from voting. Yet today, just over four decades later, blacks and whites from across the country have selected an African American man as the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party.
The United States has undergone an extraordinary, awe-inspiring transformation -- particularly so for those who remember what the South was like not so long ago. In 1964, the right to vote remained a white privilege, despite the promise of the 15th Amendment. Blacks were routinely kept from the polls by fraudulent literacy tests, violence and intimidation. Without the franchise, they had little or no say in what policies their "representatives" in Congress might support, where state health dollars would go or which local streets would get sidewalks. To have the vote was to belong to the American community; the disfranchised had been stripped, in a fundamental sense, of their citizenship. There were, of course, no black elected officials from the South.
The fight for civil rights -- voting rights in particular -- was a long, difficult one. On March 7, 1965, John Lewis was in Selma, Ala., when state troopers used electric cattle prods, nightsticks and tear gas to suppress a peaceful voting rights march. In the South in 1965, blacks who were so "uppity" as to try to vote could find themselves without a job or credit at a store -- or with a bullet in the back. That's what happened to Medgar Evers, the Mississippi NAACP field secretary, in 1963.
But five months after that "Bloody Sunday" in Selma, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law. The country did not change overnight, but within two years, the percentage of eligible blacks registered to vote in Mississippi climbed from 6.7% to 60%. Today, impediments to black voting have virtually disappeared, and Barack Obama, a black man serving his first term as a U.S. senator from Illinois, has an excellent chance of becoming president.
This is a well-known story, of course, but the fact is that despite the obvious gains, many people remain who still talk of black disfranchisement. Despite the sheer numbers -- today, for instance, there are 43 African Americans serving in Congress (including John Lewis) -- there's a sense that it's callous, and possibly even racist, to dare suggest that blacks have come a long way.
