Remember When: The Day America Put Its Promise in Writing

She was beaten unconscious on a bridge named for a Ku Klux Klan leader, for daring to march and demand the vote. Four months later, she stood in the room as the president who saw the photograph of her lying on that bridge signed the law she'd nearly died for.

On August 6, 1965, Amelia Boynton Robinson watched President Lyndon B. Johnson sign the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law, calling it "one of the most monumental laws in the entire history of American freedom." It was the most sweeping federal protection of Black Americans' right to vote since Reconstruction — and it would not have existed without the blood and courage of ordinary people who refused to accept that democracy could belong to only some of us.

The road to that signing ran through Selma, Alabama, where months earlier, on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, state troopers beat peaceful marchers with clubs and tear gas on what became known as Bloody Sunday. Boynton was struck twice and knocked unconscious; the photo of her lying on the bridge shocked the nation. It moved Congress. It moved a president.

The Act banned literacy tests, provided for federal oversight of elections in states with histories of discrimination, and opened the door for millions of Black voters to finally exercise a right that had been guaranteed — on paper — for nearly a century. Within a year, voter registration in Selma's Dallas County surged from a few hundred to over 11,000.

Sixty-one years later, that door is under assault again. Voter ID laws, gerrymandering, and rolling back federal oversight have chipped away at what was won at such great cost.

Leading Ladies Vote carries that history forward. Our vote is our power.

Whose vote will you fight to protect this November?

Photo: Wikipedia