Voting Rights Act of 1965

Based on Wikipedia: Voting Rights Act of 1965

The Day the South Changed Forever

On a Sunday afternoon in March 1965, six hundred people set out to walk fifty-four miles from Selma, Alabama to the state capital in Montgomery. They never made it past the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

State troopers on horseback charged into the crowd. They fired tear gas. They beat marchers with clubs. Television cameras captured it all, and that evening, Americans watching their Sunday night programs saw their fellow citizens brutalized for trying to exercise their constitutional right to vote.

Five months later, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law. The United States Department of Justice calls it the most effective piece of civil rights legislation ever enacted. The National Archives goes further, describing it as the most significant change in the relationship between federal and state governments on voting since the Civil War.

This is the story of how that law came to be, what it actually does, and why it matters today.

A Promise Broken for a Hundred Years

To understand why America needed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, you have to understand how thoroughly the country had failed to keep its promises for an entire century.

After the Civil War, the Constitution was amended three times. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, granted citizenship to anyone born in the United States and guaranteed everyone equal protection under the law. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, was supposed to be the capstone: it explicitly stated that the right to vote could not be denied based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

That last phrase mattered. Millions of formerly enslaved people were now, on paper, full citizens with the right to participate in American democracy.

For a brief moment, they did. During Reconstruction, the period from 1865 to 1877, Black Americans voted in large numbers across the South. They elected Black representatives to Congress. They served in state legislatures. They held local offices.

Then it all collapsed.

The Architecture of Disenfranchisement

Southern states didn't simply ignore the Fifteenth Amendment. They engineered around it with remarkable creativity and cruelty.

The first phase, from 1868 to 1888, relied on violence and fraud. Voters were intimidated, beaten, or killed. Ballot boxes were stuffed or destroyed. Election results were simply falsified when necessary.

The second phase was more sophisticated. From 1888 to 1908, Southern states rewrote their constitutions and passed new laws that appeared race-neutral on their face but were designed to exclude Black voters through supposedly legitimate means.

Literacy tests were a favorite tool. Registrars would ask Black applicants to read and interpret passages from the state constitution, often obscure legal language that even lawyers would struggle with. White applicants faced no such requirements, or were given simple sentences to read. The registrar decided who passed, with no appeal.

Poll taxes required voters to pay a fee, often several dollars, which would be equivalent to perhaps fifty or a hundred dollars today. For impoverished sharecroppers, this was an insurmountable barrier. Some states required voters to pay accumulated poll taxes for every year since they turned twenty-one, creating debts that were impossible to satisfy.

Grandfather clauses exempted anyone whose grandfather had been eligible to vote before the Civil War. Since almost no Black Americans in the South had grandfathers who could vote, this provision ensured that whites could pass literacy tests and poll taxes while Blacks could not.

Property requirements demanded that voters own land or other assets. Moral character tests gave registrars unlimited discretion to reject anyone for vague reasons. Some states required applicants to have two registered voters vouch for them, which was impossible in areas where no Black voters existed.

The results were devastating. In Louisiana, there were 130,334 registered Black voters in 1896. By 1904, there were 1,342. Mississippi had over 190,000 Black citizens of voting age in 1890. By 1892, fewer than 9,000 were registered. In some counties, not a single Black citizen could vote.

The Courts Looked Away

You might wonder why the Supreme Court didn't stop this. After all, the Fifteenth Amendment was clear, and Congress had passed laws in the 1870s to enforce it.

The Court had other ideas. In 1875 and 1876, it struck down key provisions of the enforcement laws. In a particularly cynical 1903 decision called Giles versus Harris, the Court acknowledged that Alabama was systematically disenfranchising Black voters in violation of the Constitution. Then it refused to do anything about it, claiming that the courts lacked the power to force states to register voters.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing for the majority, essentially argued that because the fraud was so massive and entrenched, the Court couldn't fix it. The machinery of state government was controlled by people committed to white supremacy, and no court order could change that reality.

It was a stunning abdication. The Constitution said one thing; the states did another; and the courts shrugged.

The Long Road to Selma

For the next fifty years, Black Americans in the South lived under what was effectively a system of political apartheid. They paid taxes but had no say in how the money was spent. They were subject to laws but could not elect the legislators who wrote them. They could be drafted to fight in America's wars but could not vote for the commanders who sent them.

Change came slowly.

In 1944, the Supreme Court struck down white primaries, which had excluded Black voters from the only elections that mattered in the one-party South. In 1954, it declared school segregation unconstitutional in Brown versus Board of Education. The modern civil rights movement was building momentum.

Congress finally acted in 1957, passing the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 authorized the Attorney General to sue on behalf of voters whose rights were violated. It created a Civil Rights Division within the Justice Department. It established a commission to investigate voting discrimination.

It wasn't enough.

The problem was that the law required case-by-case litigation. To prove discrimination, Justice Department lawyers had to examine thousands of voter registration applications, comparing rejected applications from Black citizens with accepted applications from whites. Local officials would claim records were lost, remove registered Black voters from the rolls, or simply resign so that registration stopped entirely.

Even when the government won cases, it didn't matter much. As soon as one discriminatory practice was struck down, states would invent a new one. The whole process would start over.

Between 1957 and 1964, the Justice Department brought seventy-one voting rights lawsuits. Black voter registration in the South barely budged. In Mississippi, fewer than seven percent of eligible Black citizens were registered. In Alabama, it was around twenty percent.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the landmark law that desegregated public accommodations, included some voting provisions but didn't fundamentally change the game. President Johnson knew it, and shortly after the 1964 election gave him huge Democratic majorities in Congress, he secretly instructed his Attorney General to draft, in Johnson's words, "the goddamndest, toughest voting rights act that you can."

But Johnson wasn't ready to move publicly. His advisers warned him that pushing voting rights so soon after the Civil Rights Act would be politically costly. Johnson was focused on his Great Society programs and didn't want to anger the Southern Democrats whose support he needed.

Events in Alabama would force his hand.

Selma

Selma was chosen deliberately. Civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr. and James Bevel of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, along with activists from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (called "SNCC" and pronounced "snick"), knew that the city's sheriff, Jim Clark, was violently opposed to Black voting rights and likely to react brutally to protests.

Their strategy was simple and unflinching. As James Forman of SNCC explained, the goal was to force the federal government to intervene. And if the government didn't intervene, that failure would itself be a powerful message about where the government stood.

In January 1965, King and other leaders began organizing voter registration drives and peaceful demonstrations. Police responded with arrests and violence. The protests made national news. Hundreds of demonstrators were jailed. On February 1, King himself was arrested for violating an ordinance against marching.

While King was in jail, Malcolm X arrived in Selma and gave a speech that electrified the movement. Malcolm privately told associates that he wanted to frighten white Americans into supporting King. If they didn't accept King's nonviolent approach, they might have to deal with more radical alternatives.

King wrote a letter from his cell, published in the New York Times, making the case for voting rights. President Johnson, seeing the national attention, reversed course and announced he would send voting rights legislation to Congress.

Then came Marion.

Jimmie Lee Jackson

On the night of February 18, in the small town of Marion, about thirty miles from Selma, state troopers attacked a voting rights march. The marchers scattered. A young man named Jimmie Lee Jackson ran into a café with his mother and elderly grandfather, trying to escape the violence.

Troopers followed them inside. An officer named James Bonard Fowler shot Jackson in the stomach. He was twenty-six years old, unarmed, trying to protect his mother.

Jackson died eight days later.

His death transformed the movement. James Bevel proposed a march from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital, to bring their grievances directly to Governor George Wallace. On March 7, about six hundred people set out.

They got as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Bloody Sunday

The bridge was named for a Confederate general and Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. On its far side, state troopers and county police waited on horseback.

When the marchers crossed the bridge, the troopers attacked. They fired tear gas. They charged on horses. They beat people with clubs and whips. The marchers fled back across the bridge, choking and bleeding.

That evening, ABC interrupted its broadcast of "Judgment at Nuremberg," a film about Nazi war crimes, to show footage of American police attacking American citizens for trying to exercise their constitutional rights. The juxtaposition was not lost on viewers.

The nation reacted with outrage. A second march was organized for March 9, though this one turned back at the bridge after a symbolic confrontation, a decision that frustrated some activists. That night, a white Unitarian minister from Boston named James Reeb was beaten by Klansmen. He died two days later.

On March 15, President Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress. In one of the most powerful speeches of his presidency, he called for immediate passage of voting rights legislation. Then he did something remarkable: he adopted the anthem of the civil rights movement as his own.

"Their cause must be our cause too. 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."

Two days later, the Voting Rights Act was introduced in Congress. On March 21, under the protection of federal troops, marchers finally completed the journey from Selma to Montgomery. Twenty-five thousand people walked into the Alabama capital.

What the Law Actually Does

The Voting Rights Act is a complex piece of legislation, but its core purpose is simple: to ensure that every citizen can vote regardless of race.

It works through two main mechanisms.

General Provisions

Section 2 applies everywhere in the country. It prohibits any voting practice that results in discrimination against racial minorities or members of language minority groups. This includes not just intentional discrimination but also practices that have a discriminatory effect, regardless of intent.

This was crucial. States had become expert at designing voting rules that appeared neutral but systematically disadvantaged Black voters. Section 2 meant that intent didn't matter; if the result was discrimination, the practice was illegal.

The Act also banned literacy tests nationwide. These tests had been the primary tool for disenfranchisement, and their elimination opened the voter rolls to millions of citizens who had been excluded for generations.

Other provisions required jurisdictions with significant populations of language minorities to provide ballots and election materials in multiple languages. If ten percent of voting-age citizens in a jurisdiction spoke a language other than English, that jurisdiction had to accommodate them.

Special Provisions and Preclearance

The Act's most powerful innovation was Section 5, the preclearance requirement. This applied only to jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination, as determined by a coverage formula in Section 4.

The idea was elegant. These jurisdictions had proven that they would discriminate if given the chance. So instead of waiting for them to discriminate and then suing afterward, the law required them to get permission before making any changes to their voting procedures.

Any change—moving a polling place, changing voting hours, redrawing district lines, altering registration requirements—had to be submitted to either the United States Attorney General or a special federal court in Washington, D.C. The jurisdiction had to prove that the change would not discriminate against minority voters. Only then could it take effect.

This flipped the burden of proof. Instead of victims having to prove discrimination after the fact, potentially racist jurisdictions had to prove their innocence in advance.

The coverage formula initially captured most of the Deep South, including Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Virginia, and parts of North Carolina. Later amendments expanded coverage to include parts of other states and added protections for language minorities, bringing in jurisdictions in the Southwest and elsewhere.

The Law in Action

The results were immediate and dramatic.

In Mississippi, Black voter registration jumped from about seven percent to nearly sixty percent within a few years. Across the South, hundreds of thousands of Black citizens registered to vote for the first time. By 1968, a majority of eligible Black voters in every Southern state were registered.

But it wasn't just about numbers on registration rolls. The Act changed what government looked like and what it did.

Research has shown that areas with higher Black population shares began receiving more public goods after the Act passed. Schools improved. Roads got built. Services expanded. When citizens can vote, politicians have to serve them.

Black representation in office increased dramatically. In 1965, there were fewer than a hundred Black elected officials in the South. By the mid-1980s, there were thousands. Congress began to include more members who voted for civil rights legislation.

The preclearance provision, Section 5, blocked hundreds of discriminatory voting changes that might otherwise have taken effect. Between 1965 and 2013, the Justice Department objected to over one thousand proposed changes. These weren't hypothetical threats; they were actual attempts by covered jurisdictions to make it harder for minorities to vote.

The Undoing

For nearly fifty years, the Voting Rights Act worked. Then the Supreme Court began to dismantle it.

Shelby County versus Holder

In 2013, the Court decided Shelby County versus Holder. Shelby County, Alabama challenged the coverage formula—the provision that determined which jurisdictions had to get preclearance before changing their voting rules.

The Court, in a 5-4 decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts, struck down the coverage formula as unconstitutional. The reasoning was that the formula was based on data from the 1960s and 1970s, and conditions had changed. The Deep South of 2013, the Court suggested, was not the Deep South of 1965.

The decision didn't technically strike down Section 5 itself. The preclearance requirement remained on the books. But without a coverage formula to determine which jurisdictions were covered, Section 5 became unenforceable. It was like keeping a speed limit on the books but removing all the speed limit signs.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a blistering dissent. She compared the majority's logic to "throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet." The reason the South had improved, she argued, was precisely because the Voting Rights Act was working. Eliminating the protection because it was succeeding made no sense.

She was right to be concerned. Within hours of the decision, Texas announced it would implement a strict voter ID law that had been blocked under Section 5. Other states followed. The rate of voter purges—removing people from registration rolls—increased dramatically in jurisdictions that had been covered by preclearance.

Brnovich versus Democratic National Committee

The second blow came in 2021. In Brnovich versus Democratic National Committee, the Court substantially weakened Section 2, the general provision that applies nationwide.

Arizona had enacted voting restrictions that disproportionately affected minority voters. Under the traditional understanding of Section 2, that disparate impact would make the laws illegal. But the Court, in another decision written along ideological lines, reinterpreted Section 2 to be much narrower.

The ruling held that fears of election fraud could justify voting restrictions even without evidence that such fraud had actually occurred. It also held that merely having a disparate impact on minority voters wasn't necessarily enough to invalidate a law.

This was a dramatic shift. One of the rules upheld in Brnovich had actually been blocked under Section 5 before the Shelby County decision made preclearance unenforceable. Now the Court was saying it was fine under Section 2 as well.

Where We Stand

Today, the Voting Rights Act remains on the books, but it is a shadow of what it was. Section 5 is technically still law but cannot be enforced without a new coverage formula, which Congress has not enacted. Section 2 has been interpreted so narrowly that proving discrimination has become extremely difficult.

Meanwhile, states have enacted hundreds of new voting restrictions. Strict voter ID requirements, limits on early voting, purges of voter rolls, reductions in polling places, restrictions on mail-in voting—the creativity that Southern states showed in the Jim Crow era has found new expression.

Some of these restrictions may be motivated by legitimate concerns about election administration. Others are transparently designed to make voting harder for specific populations. Without effective federal oversight, distinguishing between the two has become the work of endless litigation.

The fundamental question the Voting Rights Act tried to answer remains unresolved: How do you ensure that every citizen can exercise the most basic right of democracy when some citizens have historically been denied that right, and when some political actors benefit from their continued exclusion?

The march from Selma to Montgomery was fifty-four miles long. The marchers walked for five days. Fifty years later, in 2015, President Barack Obama spoke at the bridge to commemorate the anniversary.

The Edmund Pettus Bridge still stands, still named for a Confederate general and Klan leader. People still cross it. The question of who gets to vote, and how easily, and whether their votes will count equally—that question is still being answered.