This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.
Find the past “On This Day in History” here.
March 15 is the 74th day of the year (75th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 291 days remaining until the end of the year.
In the Roman calendar, March 15 was known as the Ides of March.
On this day in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress to urge the passage of legislation guaranteeing voting rights for all.
Using the phrase “we shall overcome,” borrowed from African-American leaders struggling for equal rights, Johnson declared that “every American citizen must have an equal right to vote.” Johnson reminded the nation that the Fifteenth Amendment, which was passed after the Civil War, gave all citizens the right to vote regardless of race or color. But states had defied the Constitution and erected barriers. Discrimination had taken the form of literacy, knowledge or character tests administered solely to African-Americans to keep them from registering to vote.
“Their cause must be our cause too,” Johnson said. “Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”
The speech was delivered eight days after racial violence erupted in Selma, Alabama. Civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King and over 500 supporters were attacked while planning a march to Montgomery to register African-Americans to vote. The police violence that erupted resulted in the death of a King supporter, a white Unitarian Minister from Boston named James J. Reeb. Television news coverage of the event galvanized voting rights supporters in Congress.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 (42 U.S.C. §§ 1973 – 1973aa-6 is a landmark piece of national legislation in the United States that outlawed discriminatory voting practices that had been responsible for the widespread disenfranchisement of African Americans in the U.S.
Echoing the language of the 15th Amendment, the Act prohibits states from imposing any “voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure … to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” Specifically, Congress intended the Act to outlaw the practice of requiring otherwise qualified voters to pass literacy tests in order to register to vote, a principal means by which Southern states had prevented African-Americans from exercising the franchise The Act was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, who had earlier signed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law.
The Act established extensive federal oversight of elections administration, providing that states with a history of discriminatory voting practices (so-called “covered jurisdictions”) could not implement any change affecting voting without first obtaining the approval of the Department of Justice, a process known as preclearance. These enforcement provisions applied to states and political subdivisions (mostly in the South) that had used a “device” to limit voting and in which less than 50 percent of the population was registered to vote in 1964. The Act has been renewed and amended by Congress four times, the most recent being a 25-year extension signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2006.
The Act is widely considered a landmark in civil-rights legislation, though some of its provisions have sparked political controversy. During the debate over the 2006 extension, some Republican members of Congress objected to renewing the preclearance requirement (the Act’s primary enforcement provision), arguing that it represents an overreach of federal power and places unwarranted bureaucratic demands on Southern states that have long since abandoned the discriminatory practices the Act was meant to eradicate. Conservative legislators also opposed requiring states with large Spanish-speaking populations to provide bilingual ballots. Congress nonetheless voted to extend the Act for twenty-five years with its original enforcement provisions left intact.
44 BC – Julius Caesar, Dictator of the Roman Republic, is stabbed to death by Marcus Junius Brutus, Gaius Cassius Longinus, Decimus Junius Brutus and several other Roman senators on the Ides of March.
221 – Liu Bei, a Chinese warlord and member of the Han royal house, declares himself emperor of Shu-Han and claims his legitimate succession to the Han Dynasty.
351 – Constantius II elevates his cousin Gallus to Caesar, and puts him in charge of the Eastern part of the Roman Empire.
933 – After a ten-year truce, German King Henry I defeats a Hungarian army at the Battle of Riade near the Unstrut river.
1311 – Battle of Halmyros: The Catalan Company defeats Walter V of Brienne to take control of the Duchy of Athens, a Crusader state in Greece.
1493 – Christopher Columbus returns to Spain after his first trip to the Americas.
1514 – Jodocus Badius Ascensius publishes Christiern Pedersen’s Latin version of Saxo’s Gesta Danorum, the oldest known version of that work.
1545 – First meeting of the Council of Trent.
1564 – Mughal Emperor Akbar abolishes jizya (per capita tax) .
1672 – Charles II of England issues the Royal Declaration of Indulgence.
1776 – South Carolina becomes the first American colony to declare its independence from England and set up its own government.
1781 – American Revolutionary War: Battle of Guilford Courthouse – Near present-day Greensboro, North Carolina, 1,900 British troops under General Charles Cornwallis defeat an American force numbering 4,400.
1783 – In an emotional speech in Newburgh, New York, George Washington asks his officers not to support the Newburgh Conspiracy.
The plea is successful and the threatened coup d’état never takes place.
1820 – Maine becomes the 23rd U.S. state.
1848 – A revolution breaks out in Hungary. The Habsburg rulers are compelled to meet the demands of the Reform party.
1877 – The first Test cricket match begins between England and Australia.
1906 – Rolls-Royce Limited is incorporated
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1916 – President Woodrow Wilson sends 12,000 United States troops over the U.S.-Mexico border to pursue Pancho Villa.
1917 – Tsar Nicholas II of Russia abdicates the Russian throne and his brother the Grand Duke becomes Tsar.
1922 – After Egypt gains nominal independence from the United Kingdom, Fuad I becomes King of Egypt.
1926 – The dictator Theodoros Pangalos is elected President of Greece without opposition.
1931 – SS Viking explodes off Newfoundland, killing 27 of the 147 on board.
1933 – Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss keeps members of the National Council from convening, starting the austrofascist dictatorship.
1939 – World War II: German troops occupy the remaining part of Bohemia and Moravia; Czechoslovakia ceases to exist.
1939 – Carpatho-Ukraine declares itself an independent republic, but is annexed by Hungary the next day.
1943 – World War II: Third Battle of Kharkov – the Germans retake the city of Kharkov from the Soviet armies in bitter street fighting.
1945 – World War II: Soviet forces begin an offensive to push Germans from Upper Silesia.
1952 – In Cilaos, Réunion, 1870 mm (73 inches) of rain falls in one day, setting a new world record.
1961 – South Africa withdraws from the Commonwealth of Nations.
1965 – President Lyndon B. Johnson, responding to the Selma crisis, tells U.S. Congress “We shall overcome” while advocating the Voting Rights Act.
1985 – The first Internet domain name is registered (symbolics.com).
1989 – The United States Department of Veterans Affairs is established.
1990 – Iraq hangs British journalist Farzad Bazoft for spying.
1990 – Mikhail Gorbachev is elected as the first President of the Soviet Union.
2004 – French President Jacques Chirac signs the law on secularity and conspicuous religious symbols in schools, commonly known as the headscarf ban.
2011 – Beginning of the Syrian civil war.
* Christian Feast Day:
* Constitution Day (Belarus)
* Earliest day on which Palm Sunday can fall, while April 18 is the latest; celebrated on the sixth Sunday of Lent. (Christianity)
* International Day Against Police Brutality (International)
* Ides of March (Roman Empire)
* Honen Matsuri (Japan)
* National holiday, celebrating the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 (Hungary)
* World Consumer Rights Day (International)
* World Day of Muslim Culture, Peace, Dialogue and Film (International)