PicoBlog

No right was more important for Black people in the 1960s than the right to vote. Ending segregation and discrimination was vitally important, but any gains made would be lost if the right to vote were not secured.

For the 80 years between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights movement, Blacks in the South (and many times in the North) were disallowed to vote through various means that were blatantly racist. Southern states imposed a “poll tax” which was set at a level most Black families could not afford. Then there was the “literacy test.” This scheme required a Black person to not only prove they could read, but they had to answer a series of questions, usually ending with something like, “Name all the signers of the Declaration of Independence.”

The Civil Rights movement made voting rights a centerpiece of their objectives, and nowhere in the South was it more difficult to vote as a Black person than in Selma, Alabama. The reason it was especially difficult to vote in Selma was due to the sheriff of the county, Jim Clark. He was every bit as racist and sadistic as “Bull” Connor in Montgomery, and he was determined that Black people would not vote while he was the sheriff. (The first video clip from the movie “Selma” shows how literacy tests worked to stop Black people from voting)

It was in the struggle in Selma that Annie Lee Cooper came to the fore and became enshrined as a Civil Rights hero.

She was born in 1910, when cotton bales made Selma “the queen city of the Black Belt” and were still shipped south by steamboat on the Alabama River. While white Selma flourished on cotton’s profit, Black sharecroppers and tenant farmers labored on plantations in conditions barely different from slavery. In 1901, Alabama’s newly passed state constitution purged Black voters from the rolls using poll tax and literacy requirements, and Annie Lee Cooper grew up never giving a thought to the idea that Black people could vote. It was only when she moved to Kentucky as a fourteen-year-old to live with her ill sister that she saw Black people going to the polls. She wanted to vote herself, but she was too young to do so.

Cooper returned to Selma to take care of her sick mother in April 1962 and found a job working at the Dunn Rest Home. Cooper had registered to vote when she lived in Kentucky and Ohio, and she told her friends and neighbors that she intended to vote in Selma as well.

But when she tried to register, the registrar told her she failed the test. She tried often. “Once I stood in line from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., but never got to register,” she recalls. Soon, Cooper began working with the Dallas County Voters League, organized years earlier by Amelia Boynton and her husband, and she joined the fledgling Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) effort as well.

On October 7, 1963, SNCC organized the first Freedom Day, urging Black residents to come to the Dallas County courthouse in mass and attempt to register to vote. Annie Lee Cooper was among the four hundred people who waited in line under the scorching sun that day. The large crowd of participants stood in line for hours. Her boss at the Dunn Rest Home saw her there on the news and fired her after several years of faithful service.

During this time, Jim Clark, who was the Dallas County Sheriff from 1955 to 1965, Clark used aggressive and violent means to keep Black people from registering to vote. Clark vocally opposed racial integration, wearing a button reading "Never" [integrate]. He wore military-style clothing and carried a cattle prod in addition to his pistol and club. In response to the voting drive by SNCC, Clark recruited a horse-mounted posse of Ku Klux Klan members and supporters.

In early 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) arrived in Selma to stage a campaign for voting rights and began demonstrations. On January 25, 1965, Cooper along with hundreds of other Black people, had been standing in line for hours at the county courthouse waiting to make another attempt at registering to vote. The police arrived to break up the activists, including the sadistic local sheriff Jim Clark.

As she stood waiting, Cooper uttered, “Nobody’s afraid of them.” Clark poked Cooper in the neck with his billy club, and she spun around giving him a hard right hook, and knocked Clark to the ground. The sheriff’s deputies attacked her, arrested her, and charged her with criminal provocation.

Here is another scene from the movie “Selma” depicting the incident:

Cooper’s actions violated one of the key elements of the Movement, which was non-violence. But SCLC’s James Bevel reflected on the situation: “We’re going to be working mostly with voter registration here and not everybody is nonviolent. Not everyone who registers is nonviolent; not everybody who registers is supposed to be nonviolent.”

In an interview with Jet Magazine a few weeks later, Annie Lee Cooper remarked,

“I try to be nonviolent, but I just can’t say I wouldn’t do the same thing all over again if they treat me brutish like they did this time.”

“Upfront, pleasant and…absolutely fearless” was how the late John Lewis described Selma-native Annie Lee Cooper.

Annie Cooper was held in jail for 11 hours before the sheriff's deputies dropped the charges and released her. Cooper spent the period of her incarceration singing spirituals. Some in the sheriff's department wanted to charge her with attempted murder, and she was let go. Following this incident, Cooper became a registered voter in Alabama.

In 2010, Annie Cooper was 100 years old and still lived in Selma. She died on November 24 and is remembered as another face and another hero of the Civil Rights movement who refused to be intimidated and denied her right to vote.

And Jim Clark? Mr. Clark's most despicable moment came on March 7, 1965, at the start of a peaceful voting rights march from Selma to the capital city of Montgomery. Mr. Clark and his men were stationed near Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge. Alabama State Trooper John Cloud ordered the hundreds of marchers to disperse. When they did not, Mr. Clark commanded his mounted "posse" to charge into the crowd. Tear gas heightened the chaos, and protesters were beaten.

Captured on national television, the Bloody Sunday incident spurred widespread revulsion. Even Gov. George C. Wallace, who had earlier sparked a national showdown over a refusal to integrate public schools, reprimanded the state troopers and Mr. Clark. Within a year, Clark had lost his job in part because the Voting Rights Act allowed many African Americans to register to vote and they cast ballots against Clark.

Oprah Winfrey played the role of Annie Lee Cooper in the 2014 film. Winfrey said that she took the role "because of the magnificence of Annie Lee Cooper and what her courage meant to an entire movement."

In this final film clip, Oprah Winfrey narrates Cooper’s role in the voting rights movement and her importance in winning the right to vote:

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