Question

The Movie "Selma to Montgomery March", What type of Leadership displayed by the Government?

Answer 1

Government was showing favoritism towards white citizens. They were showing partiality towards black people living in the country.

For 100 years after African Americans were granted the right to vote, that right was steadily taken away. In March 1965, thousands of people held a series of marches in the U.S. state of Alabama in an effort to get that right back. Their march from Selma to Montgomery, the capital, was a success, leading to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

African Americans first earned their right to vote in 1870, just five years after the United States ended the Civil War. That year, Congress adopted the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, which guaranteed the right to vote to black men of voting age. (Black women, like all other women, were not allowed to vote until 1920.)

The 15th Amendment was successful in getting black men to the polls. Selma elected its first black congressman, Benjamin Sterling Turner, the year the amendment passed. Citizens of Selma then elected black city councilmen and a criminal court judge.

However, in 1876, the U.S. Supreme Court and many state courts narrowed the scope of the 15th Amendment. They said it did not always guarantee the right to vote. Soon, black men began to lose their voting rights, especially in the South. This region of the United States had supported the Confederacy during the Civil War and had relied on enslaved people for much labor before their emancipation, or freedom.

Black voters were disenfranchised. To be disenfranchised means that a person or group of people loses the right to vote. Disenfranchisement happened in many ways.

Disenfranchisement

People who register a person to vote are called voter registrars or voting registrars. In the South, voter registrars were given broad powers to prevent black people from registering to vote any way they could. This was an example of government partiality.

Black people wanting to register to vote were given what were called “literacy tests.” Literacy is the ability to read and is not a requirement to vote in the United States. However, these literacy tests did not even test reading ability.

Registrars could ask people any kind of question about local, state, and federal government. If a potential voter did not answer correctly, the registrar did not allow that person to vote. Questions could be ridiculously difficult. A sample question asked on a literacy test was, "Name one area of authority over state militia reserved exclusively to the states." (Answer: The appointment of officers.) White people were not given literacy tests.

If black voters passed a literacy test, they were often forced to pay a poll tax. A poll tax was a fee that a voter had to pay in order to vote. The amount of the poll tax varied—usually between $1 and $2. This seems like a small amount. However, the yearly income of a person in the 1880s could be as low as $70 or $80.
Civil rights leader Rosa Parks wrote about the poll tax in her autobiography, My Story. "You had to pay the poll tax back to the time you were twenty-one,” she remembered. “I got registered in 1945 when I was thirty-two years old, so I had to pay $1.50 for each of the eleven years between the time I was twenty-one and the time I was thirty-two. At that time $16.50 was a lot of money."

Finally, after the tests had been passed and the poll tax paid, blacks had to find a registered voter willing to say they were good people and would make fine voters. Most voters in the South were white and would not do this.

As a result, very few black people were able to vote. They were fired from their jobs and received death threats just for trying to register. By 1965, there were counties in Alabama where not a single black person had voted for more than 50 years. In Selma, about half the voting-age population was black, but only 14 blacks had been added to the voting rolls between 1954 and 1961.