Voting Rights Act of 1965

Since the end of Reconstruction, Southern states had used poll taxes, literacy tests, and other restrictions, backed by harassment and violence, to keep Black citizens from voting. In Selma, Alabama, only 2 percent of Black residents were registered in early 1965. The murders of voting-rights workers in Mississippi in 1964 and the beating of marchers in Selma on March 7, 1965, drew national outrage. On March 15 Johnson told Congress, “Their cause must be our cause too … And we shall overcome,” and two days later he sent a voting rights bill. Congress passed it on August 5.

Section 2, closely following the Fifteenth Amendment, prohibited denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race nationwide. The act outlawed literacy tests and authorized federal examiners to register voters in jurisdictions “covered” by a formula in the law. Section 5 required those jurisdictions to obtain “preclearance” from the Justice Department or a federal court in Washington before changing voting practices. Johnson called the vote “the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice.” The Twenty-fourth Amendment had already abolished poll taxes in federal elections; in 1966 the Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s poll tax in state elections as well.