Reconstruction IV: Voting Rights At Last

HISTORY This Week

The HISTORY® Channel | Back Pocket Studios

Society & Culture, History

4.5 • 4.2K Ratings

🗓️ 23 May 2022

⏱️ 43 minutes

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Summary

May 26, 1965. One hundred years after the Civil War, Congress is debating a bill whose goal is to enforce the 15th amendment, which, in 1870, promised the right to vote regardless of race. But that’s not what happened. Now the Civil Rights movement is saying: It’s time to make real the promises of the Constitution for all Americans. The forces that undermined the First Reconstruction, and gutted the 15th Amendment, are resisting those demands. In the middle stands Lyndon B. Johnson, a Southern Senator with a record of opposing civil rights. Robert Caro, acclaimed journalist and Johnson biographer, tells us, what will change Johnson’s mind and turn him into a champion of the Voting Rights Act? And how will he manage the impossible task of getting it passed when so many Southern Senators are hellbent against it?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	the History Channel, original podcast.
0:04.3	Previously on Reconstruction.
0:07.8	As Reconstruction loses steam, a pernicious narrative takes hold.
0:12.8	The fiction that the Confederacy fought for the noble lost cause of states' rights.
0:17.9	The lost cause said the South didn't go to war to keep their slaves.
0:23.2	Short answer. And it was a lie.
0:25.3	And 100 years after the Civil War ends, too many Black Americans still don't have the rights
0:32.0	that people like Frederick Douglass had been asking for.
0:34.8	He's like freedom means nothing unless African Americans have the right to vote.
0:38.2	History this week. May 26, 1965.
0:47.3	I'm Sally Helm.
0:48.3	The Senate session opens with a nod to the cruelty of the world.
0:55.4	It comes from the Senate Chaplain who offers a prayer.
0:58.8	He says all the men in this room are standing in the midst of swift social currents
1:04.8	and lurking evil forces whose hideous cruelty stabs are anguished sympathies.
1:11.2	The bill up for debate today is about those swift social currents,
1:19.2	but hideous cruelty. A bill to enforce the 15th amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
1:27.0	The Voting Rights Act. The 15th amendment was supposed to guarantee voting rights to all men
1:34.8	regardless of race. But many Black voters face unfair obstacles at the polls, especially in the south.
1:43.0	They have to pay poll taxes, which burden them disproportionately.
1:46.6	They're sometimes kept from voting by mob violence and police violence.
1:51.4	One county in Mississippi has 5,561 Black residents, and none are registered to vote.
	...

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