In June 1965, the Voting Rights Act languished in the House Rules Committee after passage in the Senate. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote this letter to the New York Amsterdam News urging its passage as the first step in ensuring access to the ballot.
The Senate had passed its version of the Voting Rights Act but the House Rules Committee was holding up the legislation when King wrote an editorial in the black-owned New York Amsterdam News on June 19, 1965. The House panel approved the bill 12 days later, and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed Congress’s final rendering into law on August 6, in the Capitol. King was in attendance and received one of the pens that LBJ used.
I n a recent dinner with Vice President Hubert Humphrey at an American Jewish Committee Meeting in New York City, he assured me that we would have a voting bill by the end of June.
The Vice President’s assurances have already been reinforced by the Senate’s recent passage of a voting bill. Another victory in our hard struggle for equal rights looms before us. For not only is passage of voting legislation by the House expected, it is reliably predicted that the bill will be strengthened in that august Legislative Body.
We cannot rest. Laurels have not yet been earned. We must toil on during the hot sweltering summer months. We must get our long deprived people registered in the South’s infamous blackbelt counties.
Voting legislation does not put the names of Negroes on voting lists. We are not so naive as to believe persons who have traditionally opposed our right to vote will now desist from intimidating us.
There must be a change. There will be a change. For to deny a person the right to exercise his political freedom at the polls is no less a dastardly act as to deny a Christian the right to petition God in prayer.
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference has taken a giant step toward getting more Negro names on southern voting lists.
Many of the frustrations of a politically deprived people will surely be erased by SCLC’s Summer Community Organization and Political Education Project ( scope ).
scope is designed to involve entire communities in a coordinated program of massive voter registration, political education and community organization. There are surely difficult times ahead in the struggle to secure the rights of all Americans and our scope project will be an ambitious effort to change the political structure of the south.
Through scope we will launch one of the most intensive attacks ever conceived to fight disfranchisement, educational deprivation and poverty.
Our efforts will be concentrated in 75 counties within Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Louisiana.
The scope program will start June 22, just a week before expected passage of the voting bill. When the bill is signed in to law we anticipate having thousands of college and university personnel laboring in our scope program.
A vivid portrayal of the Negro disfranchised is found in voter registration statistics of three Alabama blackbelt counties.
