Tag Archives: Abraham Lincoln

In June 11, 1963, during a national television address about civil rights, John F. Kennedy stated: “We preach freedom around the world…, but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other, that this is a land of the free except for Negroes?” (Foner 921) Kennedy was killed few months after this presentation without enacting his civil rights bill, in which, among other points, he proposes the right to vote to blacks. One hundred years before Kennedy’s speech about civil rights, Abraham Lincoln expressed in his last public address his support to black suffrage. Like Kennedy, Lincoln was assassinated few days later.  

 After many years of struggle and opposition to the idea of giving blacks the same rights that whites enjoyed, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a major conquest that black people needed in order to fortify their participation in political life. Therefore, from my point of view, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was the most important legislation of that time. Not only presidents or politicians like Robert Kennedy were assassinated, but also popular African American civil rights activists like Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and Martin Luther King Jr. were killed.