HOW SHE SEES IT Voting Rights Act changed the nation

By MARSHA MERCER
MEDIA GENERAL NEWS SERVICE
WASHINGTON -- In 2005, President Bush speaks movingly about the need to spread freedom and liberty around the globe. Forty years ago, President Lyndon Johnson summoned the nation to a cause close to home: the freedom of all Americans.
"There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem," Johnson said March 15, 1965, in a televised speech to Congress.
The American problem was that in many places, men and women were kept from voting because of the color of their skin.
When Johnson spoke, shocking images of violence in the South were fresh in everyone's mind. Eight days earlier, a demonstration in Selma had turned bloody when state troopers and other law enforcement officials brutalized peaceful demonstrators whose only "crime" was asking for the right to vote.
The confrontation seared the nation's conscience and pushed the president to act.
In his televised address, considered among the best political speeches ever, Johnson took on the thorniest issue in America -- racial inequality. He asserted that the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation remained unfulfilled.
"A century has passed, more than a hundred years, since equality was promised. And yet the Negro is not equal," he said.
To remedy that, Johnson urged Congress to move quickly to strike provisions in all elections -- federal, state and local -- that were being used to deny blacks the right to vote. And, he called on all people to join the fight.
"There is really no part of America where the promise of equality has been fully kept," he said. "In Buffalo as well as in Birmingham, in Philadelphia as well as in Selma, Americans are struggling for the fruits of freedom.
"This is one nation. What happens in Selma or Cincinnati is a matter of legitimate concern to every American."
Less than five months later, an energized Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The night the bill passed, White House press secretary Bill Moyers went to see Johnson, expecting to find him elated by his legislative and personal triumph, David Halberstam wrote in his book "The Children."
Instead, Moyers found Johnson very depressed. Why?
"I think we've just handed the South over to the Republican Party for the rest of our lives," Johnson said.
Societal changes
The prescient remark speaks not only to Johnson's understanding of his home region but also of the magnitude of the societal changes his legislation would bring.
Johnson also knew merely passing laws wouldn't solve the problem. He signed the Voting Rights Act into law Aug. 6. Five days later, riots erupted in the Watts section of Los Angeles. They spread to a 140-block area and claimed 35 lives.
By any measure, life has improved greatly for blacks and whites in the last four decades. Blacks hold highest positions in business and government, and some 9,000 blacks nationwide hold elective office. Savvy Southerners like Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter have built coalitions with blacks to win the presidency. Republicans court black voters, and Democrats take blacks for granted at their peril.
Now, though, Republicans and Democrats also woo Hispanics. The demographics have shifted. Hispanics, not blacks, are the nation's largest minority community, according to the Census Bureau.
Hispanics have not yet gained the political clout their numbers would indicate, because many are not yet citizens and don't vote. That's likely to change.
The Voting Rights Act now protects Hispanics as well as blacks from voting discrimination. When the law comes up for renewal in 2007, supporters will cite rising numbers of Hispanics as one reason to extend it.
Johnson couldn't have foreseen that change, but he did warn it was futile to cling to the past.
"I say to all of you here, and to all in the nation tonight, that those who appeal to you to hold on to the past do so at the cost of denying you your future."
X Marsha Mercer is bureau chief for Media General News Service. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.