By Dee Anne Finken, Communications Team Chair, LWV of Clark County 

Learn firsthand about the challenges that faced political, civic, and business leaders involved in the hundred-year struggle for Black voting rights during a free interactive workshop,“ Martin Luther King Jr. and the Struggle for Black Voting Rights,” Wednesday, March 23, 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m., hosted by the League of Women Voters of Clark County and the Fort Vancouver Regional Libraries. 

The program details the strategies that civil rights activists employed, with a special emphasis on the civil disobedience protests of the mid-20th-century civil rights movement, culminating with King leading protesters across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965.   

Employing the critical-thinking approach promoted by the Harvard Business School Case Method, the online workshop will put audience members in the role of chief decision-makers. For example, the facilitator will pose questions such as “Would you have crossed that bridge?” 

“The workshop provides participants an opportunity to think on your feet and sharpen your analytical skills,” said Mary Schick of the Clark County League’s Civics Education Committee. “The experience empowers a person to make critical decisions in real time.”  

Just some of the many topics the workshop will cover are racial segregation from 1865 to 1965, Jim Crow, Black disenfranchisement and poll taxes, Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education, the civil rights movement, Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. 

Register online through the Fort Vancouver Regional Libraries website. Reading materials will be sent to registered participants before the event. For more information, contact the library at 360-906-5000, or the LWV of Clark County.