HJR 7020

                                                                      <BillNo> <Sponsor>
                              HOUSE JOINT RESOLUTION 7020
                                           By Jones J
                              A RESOLUTION to honor the civil rights martyrs whose sacrifice
                                           paved the way for passage of the Voting Rights
                                           Act of 1965.
       WHEREAS, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed largely in response to the brutal
murders of activists fighting to register Black voters in the South, most notably Jimmie Lee
Jackson, Reverend James Reeb, Viola Liuzzo, George Lee, Lamar Smith, Samuel Younge, Jr.,
and the trio of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner; and
       WHEREAS, Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot and killed by an Alabama state trooper in
February 1965 while protecting his mother during a peaceful voting rights march in Marion,
Alabama. His death directly prompted the Selma to Montgomery march; and
       WHEREAS, Reverend James Reeb, a white Unitarian Universalist minister from Boston,
Massachusetts, who answered Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s call to march in Selma, Alabama,
was beaten to death by segregationists in March 1965, and his death spurred President Lyndon
Johnson to push for the Voting Rights Act; and
       WHEREAS, Viola Liuzzo was a Detroit, Michigan, homemaker and mother who was
murdered by a Klansman while driving activists back to Selma, Alabama, after the successful
march to Montgomery, Alabama, in March 1965; and
       WHEREAS, George Lee was a minister and NAACP leader in Belzoni, Mississippi, who
was shot to death in 1955 for refusing to stop registering Black people to vote; and
       WHEREAS, Lamar Smith was murdered in 1955 on the courthouse lawn in Brookhaven,
Mississippi, for encouraging voter registration; and
       WHEREAS, Samuel Younge, Jr., was a twenty-one-year-old student activist killed in
1966 in Tuskegee, Alabama, for trying to use a "whites-only" restroom while working on voting
rights registration; and
                                              HJR7020
                                               019119
                                                -1-
       WHEREAS, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were three
young civil rights workers, two white, one Black, who were abducted and murdered by the KKK
in Mississippi in June 1964 while registering voters; and
       WHEREAS, their sacrifices, along with many others, galvanized national support for
federal intervention as the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed into law on August 6, 1965;
and
       WHEREAS, the Voting Rights Act was "born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and
civil rights marchers" and is considered the crown jewel of the Civil Rights Movement, having
been won through brutal violence and sacrifice rather than freely given; now, therefore,
       BE IT RESOLVED BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE ONE HUNDRED
FOURTEENTH GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF TENNESSEE, THE SENATE
CONCURRING, that we hereby honor the memory of the martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement,
whose sacrifice paved the way for the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
       BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that an appropriate copy of this resolution be prepared
for presentation with this final clause omitted from such copy and upon proper request made to
the appropriate clerk, the language appearing immediately following the State seal appear
without House or Senate designation.
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