Civil Rights

Leyth Jamal claims she was mistreated and lost her job because of gender identity

A former employee of Saks & Co. is taking the luxury retail store to court in Texas, claiming that she was discriminated against for being transgender.

Leyth Jamal says she was belittled by coworkers, forced to use the men’s room and repeatedly referred to by male pronouns (he and him) before ultimately being fired. The company responded in late December with a motion for the federal court to dismiss the case. In it, Saks’ lawyers don’t spend much time on any specific claims about mistreatment, instead arguing that transgender people simply aren’t protected by federal non-discrimination laws.

Legal experts who specialize in LGBT issues disagree. While there’s no federal law protecting transgender people from discrimination, courts and government agencies have taken the position that it is illegal, especially in recent years.

The Saks team declares it is “well settled” that transgender people are not protected under Title VII, the portion of the Civil Rights Act that prohibits discrimination based on sex. Opening their defense, they quote from a 7th circuit ruling that says sex discrimination is not synonymous with “discrimination based on an individual’s sexual identity disorder or discontent with the sex into which they were born.” But it’s important to note that this ruling was made in 1984.

“We’ve seen a real turnaround,” says Shannon Minter, legal director for the National Center for Lesbian Rights. “Early cases from the ’70s and ’80s were negative … but starting about 10 years ago, there began to be a reversal of that.”

Ilona Turner, legal director at the Transgender Law Center, says that if anything is “well settled,” it’s the fact that transgender people should be protected under Title VII. “The trend has been very, very strong in recent years,” she says of court decisions in cases involving transgender employees and students.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a federal agency in charge of enforcing laws that prohibit discrimination against job applicants or employees, takes a similar position on the matter. “We have claimed that to discriminate against someone based on their gender identity is the same as gender stereotyping and therefore is discrimination on the basis of sex,” says EEOC spokesperson Justine Lisser.

She traces their position back to a Supreme Court case from 1989. Ann Hopkins, a management consultant, was refused a partnership at accounting firm Price Waterhouse and told that in order to make the cut, she should “walk more femininely, talk more femininely, dress more femininely, wear makeup and jewelry, have my hair styled.”

In the end, the case set a standard that making employment decisions based on gender stereotypes like that—expectations about how a man or woman should look or behave—amounts to sex discrimination. Turner argues that discrimination against a transgender person “is always related to the perception that they’re going against sex stereotypes.”

In 2012, the EEOC made a landmark decision in a case known as Macy v. Holder. According to the complaint, a transgender woman applied for a job with a federal agency while still presenting as a man. She was qualified for the position, had a successful interview and was told she had the job as long as no problems arose during her background check. During this time, the applicant alerted the agency that she would be transitioning from male to female, and a few days later she was told that funding had dried up and the job was no longer available. Then she found out that someone else had been hired instead.

The case led the EEOC to explicitly state that discrimination based on gender identity is a form of sex discrimination under Title VII. “To refuse to hire her because she was a man who had transitioned to a woman was equal to saying she didn’t meet some social norm,” says Lisser. The EEOC now has two lawsuits pending against private companies who allegedly discriminated against workers for being transgender, under the same interpretation of the law.

In December 2014, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the entire Department of Justice would also be taking the position in litigation that Title VII protects people from discrimination based on their transgender status. “This important shift will ensure that the protections of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 are extended to those who suffer discrimination based on gender identity,” Holder said. “And it reaffirms the Justice Department’s commitment to protecting the civil rights of all Americans.”

The announcement underscored just how quickly things are changing: Holder was the namesake in the Macy v. Holder case, because she had applied for a job with a bureau in the Department of Justice.

Still, the Saks’ case could go either way. Courts have ruled in conflicting ways on the issue, and despite Americans’ common belief that there is a federal law barring discrimination against LGBT people, no such statute exists. While 18 states have non-discrimination laws that cover sexual orientation and gender identity (and three more cover just sexual orientation), Texas is not one of them. Consider same-sex marriage as a comparison: just because courts have been ruling in favor of allowing same-sex marriage, that doesn’t mean couples can get married in states where rulings on the issue are still pending.

“It is still not a settled question of law for the entire country and it won’t be settled until the Supreme Court addresses the issue,” says Minter. “There’s no way to secure certain and stable protections that can’t be undone except by states and the federal government enacting legislation.” In late 2014, Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley announced that he would be proposing a comprehensive LGBT non-discrimination bill in the spring, though its chances are slim in the Republican-controlled House or Senate.

Opponents of local or state-level non-discrimination bills that include gender identity often make the arguments that the specific protections are unnecessary, because legal precedents already protect transgender people and because so many corporations have their own non-discrimination policies in place.

However it shakes out, the Saks case is ammo for critics of those arguments. Despite billing itself as “inclusive to the LGBT community,” Saks’ lawyers are arguing that “employment handbooks are not contracts.” On Jan. 8, the Human Rights Campaign meanwhile suspended the company from their Corporate Equality Index, a ranking of LGBT-friendly workplace policies that Saks had scored high on in the past.

Jamal’s claims about the poor way she was treated, on top of her team’s legal arguments, will have to be tested in court. If the court rules against her, agreeing with Saks’ lawyers about Title VII, it may actually bolster politicians like Merkley who are trying to make such lawsuits moot by passing non-discrimination laws. “I just wanted to do my job,” Jamal has said, “but I was met with resistance at every step of the way.”

What we should learn from Senator Abraham Ribicoff’s failed attempt

This post is in partnership with the History News Network, the website that puts the news into historical perspective. The article below was originally published at HNN.

The Northeast has been a region at war with itself, pulled toward its higher ideals of democracy and equality yet bedeviled by racial segregation.

At some moments during the twentieth century, segregation and racism prevailed. At other times, movements for racial democracy carried the day. This presents a stark contrast with southern history, where the proponents of white supremacy strangled dissent and throttled almost every attempt to bring racial equality.

At the beginning of the 1970s, Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut illuminated all of these forces: northern racism, northern progress, and southern resistance.

This saga began in February 1970, when Ribicoff stood on the Senate floor and declared: “The North is guilty of monumental hypocrisy in its treatment of the black man.” Ribicoff’s speech came in response to an amendment proposed by Senator John Stennis of Mississippi, a longtime segregationist. The Stennis Amendment stipulated that school integration policies had to be uniform across the country. If the Senate wanted to pass a bill aimed at integrating southern schools, then northern cities would have to enact the same policies. Stennis hoped that if white northerners had to apply such policies to their own states, they would stop devising programs for school integration. Stennis had explained to his colleagues from the North: “If you have to integrate in your area, you will see what it means to us.” His amendment was a clever ruse.

Ribicoff saw an opening. By speaking in favor of the Stennis Amendment, he could give public expression to the segregation that plagued so many schools and neighborhoods above the Mason-Dixon line. He described the North’s thoroughly segregated landscape of cities and suburbs, and he denounced northern leaders for racial inequalities to deepen.

In the aftermath of Ribicoff’s speech, white southerners hailed him as a hero. Nothing warmed southern hearts more than the sight of a New England liberal who decried northern racism. Southern senators praised Ribicoff to the heavens. Dixie’s newspapers featured Ribicoff in editorials and political cartoons. A cartoon in the Richmond Times-Dispatch depicted a statue of Ribicoff on Richmond’s Monument Avenue – next to the statue of Robert E. Lee.

Yet there was one white southerner who did not join in the exaltation: the liberal journalist Robert Sherrill. In the pages of The Nation, Sherrill took the opportunity to skewer Ribicoff. And he pinpointed the vital racial differences between the North and the South. Sherrill acknowledged, “Everyone knows that the North has been no saintly station of racial benevolence…The North’s callousness toward Negroes … is long-standing.” Sherrill noted that white northerners “shoot Panthers, stuff blacks into slums,” and “flee integrated neighborhoods.” But those facts did not comprise the totality of the region’s racial practices. The North possessed other traditions. For instance, Northeastern states had passed fair employment laws and several cities had elected African American politicians. Relative to the South, “other sentiments do prevail in other regions and it is only these other sentiments in other regions – which the South calls hypocrisy – that have ever given the black man a chance in this country.” If the nation was ever to realize its dreams of democracy and freedom, it had to draw on the traditions of the North.

Many northern liberals also took Ribicoff to task. Jacob Javits jousted with his good friend on the Senate floor. Walter Mondale pointed out that the Senate had passed the Fair Housing Act in 1968, over the objections of southern senators. Indeed, during the 1960s, the nation had enacted landmark civil rights laws only because northern liberals stood strong in the face of the southerners’ filibusters. But in 1970, Ribicoff encouraged many northerners to stand with John Stennis. Ribicoff’s speech seemed to endanger efforts for integration, as it threatened to fracture the liberal bloc in the Senate. Thus the liberal Jew from New England was lionized in Virginia and scorned in New York.

One year later, Ribicoff put his money where his mouth was. He showed himself as no apologist for the South, but as someone deeply committed to desegregation. Ribicoff moved beyond mere rhetoric about northern hypocrisy. He channeled the region’s more noble traditions, and crafted a creative and forward-looking policy. In 1971, Ribicoff proposed a bill that would integrate every last urban and suburban school in America. The Urban Education Improvement Act left many of the details up to each locality. Ribicoff imagined that metropolitan areas might institute redistricting and busing, or build magnet schools and educational parks. His plan was grand, and it was to be implemented by 1983.

White southerners cried foul. Now that they were confronted with an actual integration plan – rather than just a speech exposing northern racism – they denounced Ribicoff. In turn, Ribicoff gained the support of many northerners who had previously eyed him with suspicion. His proposal suggested that northern liberals might not cede the future to John Stennis.

Yet many advocates for racial justice opposed the Urban Education Improvement Act of 1971. Leaders of the NAACP stood against the plan because they believed that 1983 was too long to wait for integration.

Ribicoff’s plan garnered mixed reactions from other northern senators. Southerners rose as one against it. The Senate defeated the bill easily in 1971, and again in 1972.

Ribicoff both laid bare the segregation that festered in northern cities and proposed a forceful plan to combat it. He exposed one powerful northern tradition: racial segregation. He also tried to revive the North’s other tradition – a commitment to racial equality. The two sides have coexisted in the Northeast, the progress together with the backlash. This is a messy history, and it can be difficult to assimilate. If we are to truly understand America’s racial history, we must reckon with the northern past – tangled and troubled as it is.

We can also recognize Ribicoff’s grand plan as one opportunity that the nation never seized. Our history is littered with roads not taken. The hope now is that Americans do not miss the opportunities presented in our own time. The moment for action is fleeting, and it can pass in the blink of an eye. Each protest in the streets presents us with a new opportunity to address the racial inequality that still shapes our society. Let us not look back, years from now, and remember this as a moment that we were too timid to seize.

Jason Sokol is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire and the author of “All Eyes Are Upon Us: Race and Politics from Boston to Brooklyn” (Basic Books)

Among other "disorders" listed in new decree on restricting licenses

A new Russian law supposedly aimed at curbing the country’s high rates of traffic accidents effectively bans transgender people from obtaining driver’s licenses.

An official decree published this week, after having been signed by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev on Dec. 29, provides a list of illnesses that disqualify people from operating motor vehicles and includes gender identity disorders.

The law published Thursday does not explicitly ban transgender people. Instead, it singles out those with “personality and behavior disorders” by referencing a section of the International Classification of Diseases, published by the World Health Organization, which includes gender identity and behavior disorders like “pathological” gambling and fetishism.

The decree drew quick condemnation from the Association of Russian Lawyers for Human Rights. “The decision of Russian Government will cause the serious violations of human rights,” the organization said in a statement. “The decision demonstrates the prejudice against the groups of citizens.”

Russia has come under frequent scrutiny for its LGBT rights record, including its crackdown on “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations” ahead of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

—Simon Shuster contributed reporting from Berlin

"This is a terrorist attack,” former NAACP leader says

The bomb that exploded outside an NAACP office in Colorado on Tuesday was a rare act of violence apparently aimed at the civil rights organization. But the incident in Colorado Springs, which is currently under investigation by the FBI, brought to mind an earlier era when threats of assassinations and bombings targeting the group were far more common.

An improvised explosive device detonated at about 11 a.m. Tuesday morning outside the NAACP’s Colorado Springs branch. No one was hurt, but nearby business owners and neighbors were shaken.

MORE: Rep. John Lewis’ Oral History of Selma and the Struggle for the Voting Rights Act

Gene Southerland, the owner of Mr. G’s Hair Design Studios, which shares a building with the NAACP chapter, said he heard a “horrendous explosion” at about 10:45 a.m. Tuesday that knocked several bottles off their shelves inside his salon. Southerland says he then stepped outside and found what looked like a 4-in. stick of red dynamite with the top blown off sitting next to a can of gasoline. Nearby neighbors told him they spotted a man leaving the area around the time of the explosion. The FBI is currently investigating the incident and looking for a balding Caucasian man in his 40s as the prime suspect.

Henry Allen, Jr., president of the Colorado Springs branch of the NAACP, says he’s hesitant to call the incident a “hate crime” and is waiting for a full investigation to be completed. He says his branch, the largest NAACP chapter in Colorado, Montana and Wyoming, has never received direct threats.

“That’s what has us a little bit confused,” he says. “Never in the history of this organization in Colorado Springs have there been live threats.”

But other civil rights leaders see the incident as almost certainly racially motivated.

“Obviously, this is a terrorist attack,” says Julian Bond, a University of Virginia history professor and a long-time chairman of the NAACP.

As head of the NAACP from 1998 to 2010, Bond says there were zero violent incidents like what occurred Tuesday in Colorado Springs. And in recent decades, acts of violence aimed at the NAACP have tapered off. But the organization has dealt with direct threats virtually since it began in 1909, with one of the worst occurring in 1951 when Harry Moore, who founded an NAACP branch in Brevard County, Florida, was killed on Christmas Day after a bomb was placed underneath his bed. No one was arrested, but several Ku Klux Klan members were suspected in the incident.

A little over a decade later, Medgar Evers, a civil rights leader and field secretary for the NAACP, was shot and killed in his own driveway after meeting with the group’s lawyers. Byron De La Beckwith, a white supremacist, was later convicted in the killing.

In 1989, Robert Robinson, legal counsel for the NAACP in Savannah, Ga., was killed by a package containing a pipe bomb. Similar parcels were sent to the NAACP branch in Jacksonville, Fla., but were discovered by local authorities before they were able to do any harm. A couple weeks later, on New Year’s Day 1990, white demonstrators protested outside the national headquarters of the NAACP, leading to heightened security at the organization’s offices around the U.S.

While the NAACP hasn’t experience incidents like what happened Tuesday in a number of years, the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, two unarmed black men who died in incidents involving white police officers, have heightened racial tensions around the country. Grand juries decided not to indict the officers, leading to weeks of protests nationwide and phrases like “I can’t breathe” and “Black lives matter” that were used to demonstrate against police officers’ use of force around the country.

Recent polls show that Americans increasingly believe race relations are deteriorating. A December 2014 Gallup poll shows that 13% of Americans believe “racism” is the most important problem facing the country today, the highest number since 1992 and the trial of Rodney King, a black man whose beating by Los Angeles Police Department officers following a car chase was caught on video. Only about 40% of respondents in a December NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll said race relations in the U.S. were “good” while 23% said they were “very bad.” Just a few years ago, roughly 70% described race relations in America as good.

As the FBI continues its investigation in conjunction with the Colorado Springs Police Department, agency officials say it’s possible that the incident may not turn out to be a hate crime.

“We’re looking at all possibilities,” says Amy Sanders, an FBI spokesperson in Denver. “Although a hate crime is certainly one possibility, or domestic terrorism.”

Sondra Young, president of the NAACP’s Denver chapter, told the Los Angeles Times that the incident “certainly raises questions of a potential hate crime.”

Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) also commented on the bombing on Twitter Wednesday afternoon by recalling a darker time for the civil rights organization.

And Bond, the former NAACP chairman, said that while acts of violence are unusual today, all chapters should remain cautious.

“You always have to worry about it,” Bond says, referring to incidents of violence. “All of our branches are potentially vulnerable. We want to send a message to everyone to be on their guard of this occurring to them.”

Remembering Marian Anderson's landmark Met performance, 60 years later

When Marian Anderson took the stage at New York’s Metropolitan Opera on this day in 1955, TIME wrote, “there were more Negroes in the audience than anyone had ever seen at the Met.” The reason was clear:

In Box No. 35 of the Golden Horseshoe, the place usually reserved for visiting statesmen and royalty, sat a small, aged lady who had once been a washerwoman in Philadelphia. Her name was Anna Anderson. As a girl, her daughter dreamed of singing in this great gilt and plush house. Now, at 52, Contralto Marian Anderson was realizing the dream. The first Negro singer to appear at the Metropolitan, she was making her debut in Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera.

There’s a lot to cringe at in TIME’s coverage of Anderson in the middle of the 20th century—not only the use of that then-common, now-defunct term “Negro,” but also her characterization as “dusky” and a perhaps well-meaning but tone-deaf statement that her achievement, “as with every Negro … is inseparable from the general achievement of her people.” That’s a lot of weight to hang on any person’s shoulders.

Yet the lily-white media was not wrong that her accomplishments carried great significance. Even before her landmark performance as the first black person to sing at the Met, she had earned herself a prominent place in the civil rights movement after a brush with the Daughters of the American Revolution. When her manager tried to book a concert at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. in 1939, the D.A.R. (the group that still owns and operates the venue) said there was no availability. As TIME reported, “while the Daughters continued to preserve a thin-lipped silence, Daughter Eleanor Roosevelt announced in her syndicated Scripps-Howard column that she was resigning from the D.A.R. in protest.”

As a counter-move, Anderson instead gave a concert at the base of the Lincoln Memorial, waiving her fee of $1,750 and performing for an audience of 75,000. The photo of the singer with Lincoln looming over her shoulder became iconic.

Anderson was primarily known for concerts and recitals like these—performing at the opera was an anomaly in her career—and, while she got her start in Europe perfecting German lieder by Brahms and Schubert, she would later be celebrated for her classically-inflected African American spirituals like “Crucifixion” and “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” She performed at the inaugurations of two presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, and was one of only a few black singers to perform at the March on Washington. (The organizers featured white singers like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, a decision for which they were criticized.) When TIME put her on the cover in 1946, the story went in the “religion” section, not “music,” and Anderson was hailed as “the religious voice of a whole religious people—probably the most God-obsessed (and man-despised) people since the ancient Hebrews.”

Among any oppressed peoples, there will be any number of firsts whom journalists and historians will assign monumental importance—and doing so makes sense in the case of Anderson, who opened the door for countless other black singers, from Robert McFerrin, Sr. (who debuted at the Met only a few weeks after Anderson, and whose contract-signing actually preceded hers) to Lawrence Brownlee, who starred in last year’s performance of I Puritani. But that view, which sees pioneers only as icons and not also as individuals, can be narrow-minded in its own way: often, white performers are celebrated for the ways they differ from everyone else, while black performers are proclaimed to be stand-ins for their entire race.

Anderson, fittingly, had a habit of rhetorically erasing her own significance by referring to herself as “one” — and she didn’t behave like the typical prima donna in her debut at the Met:

“I’m not quite sure it’s happening,” Contralto Anderson told friends and reporters [after the performance]. Apologizing for her jitters, she added: “A serious person, when beginning anything, is usually a little overanxious.” … As for the possibility of other roles at the Met, she said in her modest, impersonal way: “One is so involved in this one, no other has been thought about.”

Meanwhile, out in the packed house, it was the crowd that lifted the singer to hero status: “There were eight curtain calls. ‘Anderson! Anderson!’ chanted the standees,” TIME reported, “and men and women in the audience wept.”

U.S. District Judge Robert L. Hinkle ruled that Florida's same-sex-marriage ban is unconstitutional

(KISSIMMEE, FLA.)— Florida’s ban on same-sex marriage ended statewide at the stroke of midnight Monday, and court clerks in some Florida counties wasted no time, issuing marriage licenses and performing weddings for same-sex couples overnight.

But they were beaten to the punch by a Miami judge who found no need to wait until the statewide ban expired. Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Sarah Zabel presided over Florida’s first legally recognized same-sex marriages Monday afternoon.

Still, most counties held off on official ceremonies until after midnight early Tuesday, when U.S. District Judge Robert L. Hinkle’s ruling that Florida’s same-sex marriage ban is unconstitutional took effect in all 67 counties. Florida’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, is still pursuing state and federal appeals seeking to uphold the ban voters approved in 2008, but her effort to block these weddings until the courts finally rule was denied by the U.S. Supreme Court.

And now that same-sex marriage is a reality in Florida, Bondi’s spokeswoman told The Associated Press “the judge has ruled, and we wish these couples the best.”

The addition of Florida’s 19.9 million people means 70 percent of Americans now live in the 36 states where gay marriage is legal.

“It’s been a long time coming. We’re just so excited and so happy,” said Osceola County Commissioner Cheryl Grieb moments after she married Patti Daugherty, her partner of 22 years, at the Osceola County Courthouse in Kissimmee, just south of Orlando. Dressed in matching white pants and white embroidered shirts, the couple stood under a canopy of lace and ribbons as County Clerk of Court Armando Ramirez officiated and U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., served as a witness. A countdown clock was placed in the front of the room, and supporters counted down to midnight 10 seconds before the clock struck 12.

“I’m hyped up at the moment,” said Grieb, whose marriage was the first in Osceola County and was followed by 27 others in the early morning hours.

Outside the courthouse, about 20 protesters held signs reading “God says male and female should be married” and “Sodom and Gomorrah,” but same-sex marriage supporters ignored them.

In Key West, at the southern tip of Florida, Aaron Huntsman and William Lee Jones, exchanged nuptials early Tuesday dressed in matching black tuxedos with blue vests, shortly after getting the first marriage license issued to a same-sex couple in the Florida Keys. Several hundred people attended the wedding staged on the steps of the Monroe County Courthouse.

During vows, Huntsman and Jones exchanged handmade silver rings, embraced and kissed. Afterward, Jones removed a large silver-toned bracelet that completely encircled his left wrist. He called it “my shackle of inequality.”

“I’m elated. Overjoyed that I am finally legally recognized with the man I have loved for 12 years now,” said Jones, whose marriage was followed by nine others in Monroe County overnight.

In Palm Beach County, celebrity financial adviser Suze Orman showed up at a mass wedding of 100 couples at a Delray Beach courthouse to support two friends getting married. Orman, who married her wife, Kathy Travis, a decade ago in South Africa, said she was happy same-sex couples were finally being recognized legally in Florida, where she lives part of the time.

“This is an investment in validity,” Orman said.

Broward Clerk Howard Forman also planned to officiate a mass wedding overnight at his county courthouse, and Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer planned to do the same at city hall later in the morning. Churches throughout the state were holding mass weddings for same-sex couples on Tuesday.

On Monday, gay and lesbian couples in Miami got a head-start when Zabel said she saw no reason why same-sex couples couldn’t immediately get their marriage licenses.

Then, she married two couples, Karla Arguello and Cathy Pareto and Todd and Jeff Delmay, in her chambers, packed with supporters and news media for the event.

“Finally, Florida recognizes us as a couple,” Pareto said. “It’s just — I don’t know, sweet justice.”

But while the news was largely met with cheers or even shrugs from Florida’s more liberal enclaves, signs of opposition were evident farther north, where more conservative Floridians live.

In Jacksonville, Duval County Court Clerk Ronnie Fussell shut down the courthouse chapel, saying no marriage ceremonies — gay or straight — would be allowed there. At least two other counties in northeast Florida did the same.

“The day is going to come very soon where America is going to wake up and say, ‘Whoa! Wait a second! I wanted two guys to live together. I didn’t want the fundamental transformation of society,'” said John Stemberger, president of the Florida Family Policy council. He led the petition drive to put the gay marriage ban on the ballot back in 2008.

Republican Jeb Bush, who opposed gay marriage while serving as Florida’s governor and who now may seek the presidency, sought a middle ground Monday.

In a statement, he urged people to “show respect for the good people on all sides of the gay and lesbian marriage issue — including couples making lifetime commitments to each other who are seeking greater legal protections and those of us who believe marriage is a sacrament and want to safeguard religious liberty.”

___

Associated Press staffers J. Pat Carter in Delray Beach, Curt Anderson in Miami, Tamara Lush in St. Petersburg, Jason Dearen in Gainesville, Matt Sedensky in West Palm Beach and Melissa Nelson-Gabriel in Pensacola contributed to this report.

How TIME covered the events depicted in the new movie about MLK

The new Martin Luther King Jr. biopic Selma “differs from the rushed cradle-to-grave biopics that audiences have come to expect at this time of year,” TIME’s Daniel D’Addario wrote in his review of the movie, because “it goes deep, patiently relating the events of just a few weeks.”

Those weeks took place in early 1965, and it was clear to anyone watching then that the events would have an influence far beyond that year. In fact, TIME chose to put King on the cover of the magazine that March, as events in Selma came to a head.

“Last week the Negro’s struggle to achieve that right exploded into an orgy of police brutality, of clubs and whips and tear gas, of murder, of protests and parades and sit-ins in scores of U.S. cities and in the White House itself,” the cover story began. “It was a week in which the potential for further violence was so great that President Johnson signed an order that would have dispatched federal troops to Alabama on a moment’s notice. It was a week of intense pressures and back-room dealings, of quick emotionalism and easily achieved righteousness. And it was a very trying week for the foremost leader of the civil rights movement, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.”

Selma, the article continued, was a 99%-white city, proud of its old-fashioned values. It had already been the site of several federal voting-rights suits, but Sheriff James Clark continued to thwart black citizens’ efforts to register to vote. For weeks, King had been leading potential voters to try anyway. But after a young man named Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot, marching to register was no longer enough: On March 7, 1965, King and his followers tried to march all the way to the state capitol in Montgomery. At the Edmund Pettus Bridge, TIME reported, “troopers stood three-deep across all four lanes of the highway.” The report continued:

Suddenly the clubs started swinging. From the sidelines, white townspeople raised their voices in cheers and whoops. Joined now by the possemen and deputies, the patrolmen waded into the screaming mob. The marchers retreated for 75 yards, stopped to catch their breath. Still the troopers advanced. Now came the sound of canisters being fired. A Negro screamed: “Tear gas!” Within seconds the highway was swirling with white and yellow clouds of smoke, raging with the cries of men. Choking, bleeding, the Negroes fled in all directions while the whites pursued them. The mounted men uncoiled bull whips and lashed out viciously as the horses’ hoofs trampled the fallen. “O.K., [n—-r]!” snarled a posseman, flailing away at a running Negro woman. “You wanted to march —now march!”

Dozens of marchers ended up injured. But the world was watching. Protests began in cities around the nation. The President spoke up against the police brutality. Another march from Selma was planned.

That one was stopped as well, and after that TIME’s issue must have then gone to press. It wasn’t until the April 2 issue that a full report on the eventual success of the marchers—who finally made it to Montgomery by the end of the month— appeared in TIME. Though the Civil Rights movement still had a long way to go, the magazine’s description of that march is worthy of any Hollywood ending: “In the procession, whites and Negroes, clergymen and beatniks, old and young, walked side by side.”

Browse the Mar. 19, 1965, issue here, in the TIME Vault: Martin Luther King

The said that shirts had been banned for safety reasons

A San Francisco Bay-area high school has banned another high school from sending teams to its basketball tournament over fears that players would wear shirts emblazoned with the phrase “I Can’t Breathe.”

“I Can’t Breathe,” the last words of Staten Island man Eric Garner, who died in an apparent police chokehold, has become the cry of a movement protesting the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of the police. Professional athletes, including basketball star LeBron James, have worn “I Can’t Breathe” shirts in protest.

The boys basketball team from Mendocino High School was later allowed to rejoin the competition at Fort Bragg High School after players agreed not to wear the shirts, according to the Associated Press. The girls basketball team at Mendocino High School refused to agree to the terms.

The principal of Fort Bragg, Rebecca Walker, told the AP that shirts had been banned for safety reasons. She said she appreciated that the students were “paying attention to what is going on in the world around them.”

[AP]

Rep. John Lewis is a member of the U.S. Congress from Georgia, and in 1965 he was chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

How the fight for the African American vote was really won

Selma, Alabama, selected herself to become the battleground for the voting rights movement of the 1960s. It was a regional center of commerce and trade, but it was also starkly divided by race and class.

Members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) first decided to organize in Selma in 1962. Then, it was almost impossible for people of color to register and vote in Alabama. Even though Selma was the Dallas County seat, only 2.1% of voting age African Americans were registered to vote. We could attempt to register at the county courthouse only on the first and third Mondays of each month. We had to pass a so-called literacy test, pay a poll tax, and interpret certain sections of the Alabama state constitution. Bernard LaFayette was the first among SNCC staff to lead organizing efforts there, and during one voter registration drive, he was attacked and beaten.

After the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, on September 16, 1963, when four little girls were killed on Sunday morning, our efforts in Selma intensified. African Americans attended mass meetings and rallies by the hundreds to train and prepare to participate in nonviolent protests. People would march down to the courthouse from Brown Chapel AME Church, and stand in line all day, hoping to walk up the green marble steps, through a set of double doors, and into the registrar’s office. We stood there hour after hour, and by the end of the day, only two or three people would make it in just to get an application to register to vote.

We were met at the courthouse by Sheriff Jim Clark. He was a mean, vicious man. He wore a gun on one side and a nightstick on the other. He carried an electric cattle prodder in his hand, and he didn’t use it on cows. He wore a button on his left lapel that said “NEVER.” He would harass, threaten, try to intimidate us, and push us back down the stairs. Day in and day out from September 1963 through all of 1964, he bullied and terrorized peaceful, nonviolent protestors.

The first time I was arrested was in September of 1963. I was carrying a sign that said “ONE MAN, ONE VOTE.” For that I was arrested and taken to jail. Hundreds of people in Selma were arrested and jailed. On one occasion, he arrested so many of us that we filled the city and county jails. The rest of us were taken to a holding pen where chickens were kept. We all had to sleep on the bare wooden floor at night.

The movement came to a head in the early part of 1965 when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was invited to Selma. He came the first week in January to speak at a mass meeting. Several hundred people came out to the rally. I remember it like it was yesterday.

On January 18, it was my day to lead the people down to the Dallas County courthouse to try to register to vote. Sheriff Clark met me at the top of the steps.

“John Lewis, you’re an outside agitator. You’re a troublemaker,” Clark said.

“Sheriff, I may be an agitator, but I’m not an outsider,” I said. “I grew up only 50 miles from here, and I’m going to stay here until these people are allowed to register and vote.”

And he said, “You’re under arrest.”

A few weeks later, police ambushed a nighttime march to the courthouse in Marion, Alabama. The streetlights were shot out and the beating began. A young Vietnam War veteran named Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot while trying to protect his mother. He died a few days later. Because of what happened to him, a decision was made to march from Selma to Montgomery.

SNCC decided not to participate in the march because they felt Dr. King’s presence might overshadow the years of organizing and protest they had invested in voting rights in Selma. But I was determined to march and I told them, “If the people want to march, I’m going to march with them.” They said I could march as an individual, but not as the chairman of SNCC. That was fine with me. On March 6, several of us drove from SNCC headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, to Selma, carrying our sleeping bags. We arrived at the SNCC Freedom House in Selma where we could stay and sleep.

Meanwhile, at Dr. King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Andy Young, James Bevel, and Hosea Williams drew straws to determine who would represent the organization in the march. The one who drew the shortest straw would be the leader. Hosea pulled the shortest one, so he led the march on behalf of SCLC. The leaders of SCLC asked me to lead with Hosea.

BLOODY SUNDAY – March 7, 1965

I can never forget the next morning. We got up, went to church at Brown Chapel and prepared to march. About 500 of us kneeled, and Andy Young conducted a prayer. We got up, lined up in two’s, no one saying a word. We were absolutely silent. We began walking in an orderly, peaceful non-violent fashion, We didn’t interfere with traffic; we walked on the sidewalk along the street. When we got to the edge of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Hosea looked down at the Alabama River.

“John, can you swim?” he said.

“No. Hosea,” I said. ” Can you?”

“Yes. “

“We’re not going to jump,” I said. “We’re not going back. We’re going to move forward.” And that’s what we did.

When we came to the highest point of the bridge, we saw a sea of blue Alabama state troopers down below, and a big posse behind Sheriff Clark. The night before, the sheriff had called all white men over the age of 21 to come down to the courthouse to be deputized in order to stop the march. There were dozens of men carrying baseball bats, shotguns, and any weapons they could find.

We just kept on walking, no one saying a word. When we got a few yards away from the officers, we heard a voice on a megaphone.

“I am Major John Cloud,” the state trooper commander said. “This is an unlawful march. You have three minutes to disperse and return to your church.”

“Major, please give us a moment to kneel and pray,” Hosea requested.

In less than a minute and a half the major shouted, “Troopers advance!”

We saw men putting on their gas masks. They came toward us with nightsticks, beating us, pushing us, trampling us with horses, and releasing the tear gas. I was hit in the head by a state trooper with a nightstick. My legs felt weak under me. Apparently, I fell. I suffered a concussion on the bridge, and I thought I was going to die that day. I saw death. Fifty years later, I still don’t remember how I made it through the streets of Selma back to Brown Chapel that evening.

The church was filled to capacity, maybe a thousand or more people were there, and outside people were protesting what had happened. Someone asked me to say something. I remember what I said.

“I don’t know how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam,” I said, “but he can’t send troops to protect people in this country who only want to register and vote.”

And the next thing I knew, I along with 16 other people were being transported to a hospital in Selma run by the Sisters of St. Joseph. It was the same place where Jimmie Lee Jackson had died just a few days ago. That day, March 7, 1965, is now known as Bloody Sunday.

Early that Monday morning, Dr. King and Rev. Ralph Abernathy visited me in the hospital. They comforted me.

“Don’t worry John, ” Dr. King assured me, “We will make it from Selma to Montgomery, and the Voting Rights Act will be passed.”

News organizations had covered the march, and the film of the brutal police response was broadcast all over the nation. Americans were shocked by what they saw. Major demonstrations broke out all over America, including at the White House and in front of the Justice Department.

Dr. King made an appeal for all religious leaders to come to Selma to participate in a march. Movement lawyers of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund went to court, assisted by Assistant Attorney General John Doar. We appeared before federal judge Frank M. Johnson in Alabama and got a federal order to march from Selma to Montgomery.

On March 15th, only seven days after Bloody Sunday, President Lyndon Johnson spoke to Congress and delivered one of the most meaningful and powerful speeches any modern president has made on civil and voting rights. In that speech he used the theme song of the movement, saying, “And we shall overcome.”

SELMA TO MONTGOMERY MARCH – March 21-25, 1965

Finally, on March 21, Dr. King led a march of thousands from Selma to Montgomery. Since Governor George Wallace could not assure our protection, President Johnson commanded the National Guard to ensure our safety on the road. We arrived in Montgomery on March 25.

Congress debated the Voting Rights Act, and it was signed into law in August 1965. Because of the action of the American people, and the actions of the President and Congress, that law changed America forever, and many elected officials, including President Carter, President Clinton, President Obama, and thousands across America, are in office today because of the Voting Rights Act. It has been hailed as the most effective piece of legislation passed in America the last 50 years, and it was a crowning achievement of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

Rep. John Lewis is a member of the U.S. Congress from Georgia, and in 1965 he was chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.