Celebrating
‘City
of
Roses’
BLACK
HISTORY
MONTH
Volume XLVI • Number 8
www.portlandobserver.com
Wednesday • February 22, 2017
Established in 1970
Committed to Cultural Diversity
J.J. Moore, the longtime owner of Affordable JJ Lock and Key in northeast Portland, was only a teenager when he participated in the 1965 Selma to Montgomery civil
rights marches that drew Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders to Alabama and led to the passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
‘I Marched in Selma’
Portland locksmith
recalls the beatings
and the arrests
C hrista M C i ntyre
t he P ortland o bserver
52 years ago, Portland locksmith and
business owner J.J. Moore participated in
the historic Selma to Montgomery marches
to protest the massive discrimination fac-
ing black voters in Alabama. It was a pin-
nacle of the Civil Rights movement under
the leadership of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther
King of the Southern Christian Leadership
Council, and a young man named John
Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordi-
by
nating Committee. Together with thou-
sands of other black protesters, they helped
turn the tide with the passing of the Voting
Rights Act of 1965 under President John-
son.
The small town of Selma is seated in
Dallas County in the Alabama Black Belt.
In 1961, while the population of Dallas
County was 57 percent black, fewer than
1 percent were registered to vote because
of discriminatory voting procedures. With-
out access to the ballot box, black citizens
couldn’t choose their mayor, governor, rep-
resentatives in Congress, president or sit
on a jury. Under Jim Crow laws separating
blacks from whites, the path to voting was
littered with obstacles. Lewis, who went on
to become a Congressman, described how
at one Alabama courthouse at the time,
black citizens were asked to name exactly
how many gumballs were in a jar as a voter
registration test requirement. Other black
people who worked in the service industry
or as sharecroppers in Dallas County were
threatened by employers with losing their
jobs if they registered to vote.
Moore’s mother and father started out as
cotton sharecroppers in Selma, where the
future Portland business owner was born
and raised. His father, Thomas, learned
to be a painter by trade and his mother,
Ollie Mae became a seamstress. Through
their hard work and over time, they saved
enough money to build a house from the
ground up in Selma, something most black
people didn’t have the opportunity to do.
Owning their home and having skilled
trades also meant they couldn’t be pres-
sured to not register to vote, because they
had more economic independence than
most.
The Student Nonviolent Coordinat-
ing Committee came to Selma in 1962 to
start nonviolent direct action protests and
conduct the grassroots work needed to get
black Americans registered to vote. The
group held training sessions to prepare for
the literacy tests and other obstacles that
were used to prevent minorities from vot-
ing. Many of these meetings were held in
the famed Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church of
Selma. A teenager at the time, Moore’s par-
C ontinued on P age 8