James Armstrong
James Armstrong was born in Orrville, Alabama, in 1923 to parents who, according to Armstrong, received less than a sixth-grade education. At the age of 18, after successfully completing high school, Armstrong was drafted into the army, where he served from 1943 to 1946. Recalling this period of his life, Armstrong said that the battle overseas prepared him for "another fight." Upon his return, Armstrong worked in Selma and Mobile before settling down in a third town in Alabama, Birmingham, where he opened a barbershop in the College Hills community in 1953. His dedication to the politics of the civil rights movement was soon known to all his customers, as he adorned his door with aphorisms, such as, If you think education is expensive, try ignorance and If you don't vote, don't talk politics in here. On Armstrong's barbershop wall hung photographs of Martin Luther King, Jr., including one of King seated in Armstrong's barber chair.
Armstrong's commitment to civil rights took him to the front lines as a "foot soldier"--one of hundreds of Americans who fought each day for racial equality. Armstrong carried the American flag during a 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery (on a day that came to be known as Bloody Sunday), during which it is said that Armstrong was beaten to his knees but never dropped the flag. Over the years, he also participated in and was jailed for various anti-segregation demonstrations. In 1957, he filed a class-action lawsuit that would lead to his two sons' enrolling as the first black students at the previously all-white Graymont Elementary in 1963. He also served as a board member, voting rights education teacher and volunteer at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.
Throughout Armstrong's life, the goals of education, justice and having the ability to make change guided every decision he made and every lesson that he instilled in his children, grandchildren and fellow community members. Before he died of heart failure in 2009 at the age of 86, Armstrong witnessed the campaign and 2008 election of the first black president, Barack Obama.<
Caption: James Armstrong
Credit: Photo still from The Barber of Birmingham
» ALEX (Alabama Learning Exchange). "Oral History Interview with James Armstrong."
» The Barber of Birmingham: Foot Soldier of the Civil Rights Movement. "Background."
» The Institute for Southern Studies. "Remembering Civil Rights Leader James Armstrong."
» Stock, Erin. "James Armstrong, Civil Rights Flag Bearer, Dies." The Birmingham News, November 19, 2009.
» Tributes.com. "James Armstrong."
» Trice, Dawn Turner. "Civil Rights Lessons from James Armstrong's Barber Chair." Chicago Tribune, April 4, 2010.
Roadblocks to Voting
The Jim Crow Era
During the Reconstruction era immediately following the Civil War, the U.S. Congress passed a series of constitutional amendments to guarantee civil rights to freed slaves. The 15th amendment (1870) said that the right to vote could not be denied on the basis of "race, color or previous condition of servitude." In the two years immediately following, the nation elected one black senator and seven black representatives. And hundreds of thousands (possibly one million) black male voters registered to vote.
However, these advances in civil rights were short lived. Many whites in the South, especially in places where they were outnumbered by blacks, were threatened by African-Americans' new power to elect legislators and other officials. By 1877, segregationist whites were using a combination of violence, intimidation and fraud to reduce the number of black voters. As whites regained control of the government, they gerrymandered voting districts to make it less likely for blacks to be elected. In The Barber of Birmingham: Foot Soldier of the Civil Rights Movement, Armstrong recollects and old footage shows images of police brutality. State troopers tear gassed crowds and beat marchers with billy clubs. Amelia Boynton Robinson recalls being pushed into a cop car and carted off to jail. James Armstrong remembers a time when he, his wife and their daughter, who was 13 years old at the time, were all in jail at the same time.
By the 1890s, Southern state legislatures were passing "Jim Crow" laws that explicitly enforced racial segregation. The specifics of the laws varied from state to state, but all mandated separation of whites and blacks in public facilities, such as schools, parks, theaters, libraries, hospitals, restaurants, trains and buses and even cemeteries. In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson affirmed Jim Crow by asserting that separate facilities were constitutional as long as they were equal. Not until it issued its 1952 Brown v. Board of Education decision would the U.S. Supreme Court finally declare that "separate" was inherently "unequal."
Disenfranchisement
There were many ways that Southern states worked around the 15th amendment to deny black men the right to vote. Many states required poll taxes and literacy tests, while others established elaborate voting systems, continually rescheduling and delaying voting times. An all-white board of registrars would sometimes pick a section of the U.S. Constitution at random and ask prospective black voters (many of whom had received little schooling) to read and explain the section. In some areas, a black person who wanted to vote was required to find several white men who would vouch for his "good character."
The laws proved effective. According to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, fewer than 9,000 of the 147,000 voting-age African-Americans in Mississippi were registered after 1890. In Louisiana, where more than 130,000 black voters had been registered in 1896, the number had plummeted to 1,342 by 1904.
By the 1950s, blacks and sympathetic whites began to organize and pressure state and local governments through sometimes coordinated, sometimes separate actions including marches, protests, sit-ins, rallies, boycotts, voter registration drives and "freedom rides." While there would later be splinter groups that advocated responding to violence with violence, the initial movement used tactics of civil disobedience and embraced the principles of nonviolent resistance.
Among the organizing groups were the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and a coalition of black churches known as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Their efforts would eventually result in passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Caption: The vote means first class citizenship
Credit: Photo still from The Barber of Birmingham
» American RadioWorks. "Remembering Jim Crow."
» Facing History. "Episode 5: Mississippi: Is This America? (1962-1964)."
» History Matters. "Testimony of Hosea Guice, Milstead, Macon County, Ala."
» PBS. "The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow."
» Smithsonian National Museum of American History. "White Only: Jim Crow in America."
» The United States Department of Justice. "Before the Voting Rights Act."
Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham, Alabama
In places like Birmingham, Alabama segregation was not only the social norm--it was the law. Fred Shuttlesworth's Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR), formed in 1956, did achieve some modest successes, such as integration of the city bus system. And college student Frank Dukes started the Anti-Injustice Committee (AIC), which organized a boycott of segregated stores during the 1963 Easter shopping season. In response, segregationist forces escalated their violence. Between 1957 and 1963 there were 17 church bombings in Birmingham, leading some to give the city the nickname "Bombingham." The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, in particular, became a touchstone for the movement. The church had been a meeting place for civil rights leaders like Shuttlesworth and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the bombing propelled the issues of segregation into the national spotlight. The SCLC soon joined forces with the local ACMHR to make plans for a Birmingham campaign. The campaign leaders hoped to use concentrated pressure in a single city as a means to achieve change on the national level. SNCC chairman and SCLC board member John Lewis explained,
It was our hope that our efforts in Birmingham would dramatize the fight and determination of African-American citizens in the Southern states and that we would force the Kennedy administration to draft and push through Congress a comprehensive Civil Rights Act, outlawing segregation and racial discrimination in public accommodations, employment and education.
Organizers planned a multi-pronged approach, including a voter registration drive for African-Americans, lunch counter sit-ins, marches on city hall and a boycott of merchants during the Easter season. They held mass meetings to teach nonviolence and to recruit volunteers. In The Barber of Birmingham: Foot Soldier of the Civil Rights Movement, Armstrong recalls attending training in tactical nonviolence. Demonstrators were taught not to respond to verbal abuse or physical assaults. During sit-ins at lunch counters, protestors would demonstrate an enormous amount of discipline and resolve, sitting for hours on restaurant stools without moving or fighting back.
Movement organizers were so successful in recruiting large numbers of nonviolent protestors that they were able to expand their actions to include kneel-ins at churches, sit-ins at libraries and a march on county buildings to register voters.
Government officials attempted to put down the protests. On April 10, 1963, an injunction from the Alabama Circuit Court declared the protests to be illegal. Protestors continued to demonstrate, ignoring the injunction, which Martin Luther King, Jr. called "unjust" and a "misuse of the legal process." King was arrested on April 12, 1963 and kept in jail for eight days, during which time he wrote his famous letter from a Birmingham jail on the margins of a newspaper. King responded to criticism from moderates, writing,
For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never"... the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice".
At the time, civil rights organizers tried to get the letter published in major news outlets, but the letter did not receive much attention until the campaign had succeeded.
As the Birmingham campaign wore on, the organizers faced the tough reality that adult protestors had limited time that they could dedicate to demonstrations. SCLC organizer James Bevel came up with a solution: involve children, who had more time and fewer responsibilities. On May 2, 1963, more than 1,000 African-American children marched on downtown Birmingham. Police commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor and his officers greeted them with force. Finally, the national media began paying attention. For the next few days, images of children being attacked by dogs, beaten, by clubs and sprayed with water hoses filled television screens and newspaper pages.
Business declined and national attention was drawn toward Birmingham. Attorney general Robert Kennedy sent in Burke Marshall, assistant attorney general and the head of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, to facilitate negotiations between black citizens and business leaders. On May 9, 1963, House Republicans introduced the federal civil rights bill, which would later become the Civil Rights Act of 1964. On May 10, an agreement was reached. Terms of the agreement included: the removal of "White Only" and "Black Only" signs from restrooms and drinking fountains in downtown Birmingham; the desegregation of lunch counters; a "Negro job improvement plan"; the release of protestors from jails; and the institution of a biracial committee to monitor the agreement.
Segregationists reacted to the agreement by setting off an explosion near the hotel where Martin Luther King, Jr. was staying and bombing King's brother's house. President John F. Kennedy sent in 3,000 federal troops to help prevent further violence.
Caption: Recalling the violence of Bloody Sunday
Credit: Photo still from The Barber of Birmingham
» Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. "Resource Center Gallery."
» Civil Rights Movement Veterans. "Birmingham."
» Civil Rights Movement Veterans. "Birmingham Manifesto."
» Civil Rights Movement Veterans. "Letter from Birmingham Jail."
» Library of Congress. "The Civil Rights Era."
» Stanford University. "Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Global Freedom Struggle."
Voting Rights: 1965 Alabama
In the winter of 1965, the SNCC and the SCLC began a voter registration campaign in Selma, Alabama. Tensions between segregationists and civil rights activists ran high. In February, after a nighttime rally protesting the arrest of an SCLC leader, the electrical power went out and a mob of white men seized the moment and attacked a group of protestors. Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old black army veteran, died as a result.
In response, activists conceived of a march from Selma to the steps of the capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, where they intended to confront the governor about the recent episode of police brutality. James Bevel, an SCLC strategist explained,
If you don't deal with negative violence and grief, it turns to bitterness. So what I recommended was that people walk to Montgomery, which would give them time to work through their hostility and resentments and get back to focus on the issue. The question I put to them was, "Do you think Wallace sent the policemen down to kill the man? Or do you think the police overreacted? Now if they overreacted, then you can't go around assuming that Wallace sent the men down to kill. So what we need to do is go to Montgomery and ask the governor what is his motive and intentions."
The 40-mile march would serve another purpose as well: The five days' time that the march would require would allow the national media sufficient time to debate the issues.
On March 7, 1965, about 600 demonstrators, including James Armstrong, marched out of Selma and attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Police officers met them there and prevented them from marching any further. Protestors were sprayed with tear gas and beaten in a widely publicized incident that later became known as Bloody Sunday.
Pressure on then-president Lyndon Johnson to sign the voting rights bill immediately intensified. Two weeks later, Martin Luther King, Jr. led a second march, this time with the protection of federal troops. The second group of marchers successfully crossed the bridge and reached Montgomery. Five months later, on August 6, 1965, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, which finally eliminated all voter registration tests that had been used to discriminate against black voters. Among other stipulations, the act contained special provisions targeting areas of the country that Congress deemed more likely to have discriminatory voter registration practices. These areas--which included Birmingham--were prohibited from making any changes to their voter registration policies without first submitting those changes for review by the attorney general or the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
Caption: March across Edmund Pettus Bridge after Bloody Sunday
Credit: Photo still from The Barber of Birmingham
» American Civil Liberties Union. "Timeline: Voting Rights Act."
» BBC. "1964: Three Civil Rights Activists Found Dead."
» Facing History. "Episode 5: Mississippi: Is This America? (1962-1964)."
» Facing History. "Episode 6: Bridge to Freedom (1965)."
» National Park Service. "Civil Rights in America: Racial Voting Rights."
» The United States Department of Justice. "Introduction to Federal Voting Rights Laws."
» Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. "Documents of the Southern Freedom Movement 1951-1968."
2008 Voters
On November 4, 2008, a presidential election day, 64 percent of American citizens 18 and older went to the polls, a percentage relatively unchanged from the 2004 presidential election.
Turnout rates varied among different populations:
- Minority populations made up almost one quarter of voters.
- Among blacks ages 18 to 24, turnout increased by 8 percent to 55 percent.
- Relatively unchanged from 2004, voter turnout rates for women exceeded voter turnout rates for men--66 percent to 62 percent, respectively.
- There was a 69 percent voter turnout for ages 45 to 65, 70 percent for ages 65 and older and 49 percent of those aged 18 to 24.
- The highest voting rate was the 66 percent in the Midwest, while the rates for the West, Northeast and South averaged 53 percent.
- 77 percent of American citizens with bachelor's degrees voted, compared with 55 percent of those who had only a high school diploma or a GED.
- 70 percent of veterans voted, whereas 63 percent of non-veterans did.
Caption: Armstrong after he voted in the 2008 election
Credit: Photo still from The Barber of Birmingham
» ABC News. "Young Black Turnout a Record in 2008 Election."
» Pew Research Center. "Dissecting the 2008 Electorate: Most Diverse in U.S. History."
» Roberts, Sam. "2008 Surge in Black Voters Nearly Erased Racial Gap. The New York Times, July 20, 2009.
» United States Census Bureau. "Voter Turnout Increases by 5 Million in 2008 Presidential Election, U.S. Census Bureau Reports."
» United States Census Bureau. "Voting and Registration in the Election of November 2008."
Modern Barriers to Voting
Today there are still practices that restrict voting rights. The voting processes in the 2008 election were criticized by various parties, who voiced concerns about voter registration list manipulation; voter caging and other modes of voter suppression; voter list purges in various states, including Colorado, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Nevada and North Carolina; confusion about methods of absentee voting (a problem that specifically affected college students living on campuses away from home and troops stationed abroad); and voter eligibility.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice and the NAACP, an assault on voting rights accelerated in 2011 and has the potential to affect the participation of 5.8 million voters in the 2012 election. Attempts to curtail voting rights are aimed at all stages of the voting process-- the voter registration stage, the early voting stage and election day itself.
As of October 2011, 19 new related laws and two new related executive actions had been approved, with no fewer than 42 related bills still pending. Examples of legislation include new photo I.D. and citizenship laws, the eradication of same-day voter registration, limiting mobilization efforts around voter registration, the elimination of early voting days and absentee voting and complication of the criteria necessary to restore voting rights of former felons.
Alabama joined Kansas and Tennessee in requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. According to the NAACP, these requirements place a unique burden on elderly African-American voters, many of whom were never issued birth certificates because they were born when de jure segregation prevented equal access to hospitals. Alabama (along with six other states) has also restricted voting rights through government-issued photo identification requirements. According to the NAACP, 11 percent of U.S. citizens nationwide--approximately 22.9 million people--do not have government-issued photo I.D.s. They also point out that 25 percent of African-American voting age citizens (more than six million people) and 16 percent of Latino voting age citizens (nearly three million people) do not possess valid identification.
Although the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 both included measures to reduce voter intimidation, various incidents were reported during the 2008 election. For example, a group of black Obama supporters was reportedly heckled and harassed at an early voting center in Fayetteville, North Carolina. In Philadelphia, a lawsuit was filed against members of the New Black Panther Party, who allegedly stood outside a polling place on election day wearing military gear and discouraged people from voting. The American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico also filed a lawsuit in 2008 that charged a state representative and detective with voter intimidation, alleging they had made visits to the homes of voters they thought were guilty of citizenship-related fraud.
In May 2012, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing to consider the Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act of 2011. The act would criminalize voter intimidation and voter fraud and would require state and local election officials to correct any false information given to voters.
Caption: Armstrong watches election results in 2008
Credit: Photo still from The Barber of Birmingham
» Brennan Center for Justice. "Testimony on the Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act of 2011."
» Brennan Center for Justice. "Voting Law Changes in 2012."
» Brennan Center for Justice. "Voting Rights and Elections."
» CNN. "Ballots from U.S. Troops Risk Being Discarded."
» FrontPageMag. "Voter Fraud 2008."
» Govtrack.us. "S.453 (110th): Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act of 2007."
» Minnesota Public Radio. "Ramsey County Charges 28 for 2008 Voting Fraud."
» Pew Research Center. "Public Concern About the Vote Count and Uncertainty About Electronic Voting Machines."
» Project Vote. "Voter Intimidation."
» National Council of Jewish Women. "NCJW Launches Promote the Vote, Protect the Vote 2012."
» Schwab, Nikki. "Confusing Voter Registration Laws Could Affect Presidential Election. U.S. News and World Report, September 24, 2008.
» Thompson, Krissah. "2008 Voter-Intimidation Case Against New Black Panthers Riles the Right." The Washington Post, July 15, 2010.
» United States Election Assistance Commission. "Help America Vote Act."