One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy

by Carol Anderson

In Alabama’s Marion, Lowndes, and Dallas counties, years of nonviolent, direct-action protest led to a cinematic explosion in March 1965 on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. As peaceful marchers ran into the hailstorm of Alabama state troopers and Dallas County sheriff Jim Clark and his deputies, news cameras captured the horror of tear gas, barbed-wire bullwhips, and police on horseback trampling over the fallen. A nation sat in stunned silence, almost traumatized by the spectacle. And then the ensuing bludgeoning death in Selma of a white minister because he had the audacity to believe that black citizens had the right to vote became the tipping point, and now, shaken out of its complacency, a civil rights assembly mobilized.