The federal law, signed 6 August 1965, that suspended literacy tests and put discriminatory jurisdictions under federal oversight of their elections.
Ninety-five years after the Fifteenth Amendment barred racial discrimination in voting, only about one-third of voting-age African Americans were registered in the Southern states the act would single out, against two-thirds of eligible whites. Neither the Civil Rights Act of 1964 nor case-by-case litigation — which, as the Supreme Court later observed, had proven inadequate against widespread and persistent discrimination — had closed that gap. The murders of Freedom Summer and the attack by Alabama state troopers on marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on 7 March 1965 — where John Lewis’s skull was fractured — forced Congress to act. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on 6 August 1965.
Section 2 barred voting practices that denied or abridged the right to vote on account of race anywhere in the country. Section 4 suspended literacy tests and similar devices in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Virginia, and many North Carolina counties, and authorized federal examiners to register voters. Section 5 required those covered jurisdictions to obtain approval from the Attorney General or a three-judge federal court in Washington before changing any voting rule. The results were immediate: by the end of 1965 some 250,000 Black voters had been newly registered, a third of them by federal examiners. The Supreme Court upheld the act in South Carolina v. Katzenbach (1966).
Congress renewed and expanded the act in 1970, 1975, 1982, and 2006, adding protections for language-minority voters and, in 1982, allowing Section 2 violations to be proven without evidence of discriminatory intent. On 25 June 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, a 5–4 Court struck down the Section 4(b) coverage formula as resting on decades-old data. Section 5 remains on the books, but with no formula to say which jurisdictions it covers, preclearance has been inoperative since.
See also: Literacy Test, Poll Tax, Civil Rights Act of 1964, Freedom Summer, Reconstruction, Jim Crow
Sources
- National Archives and Records Administration, “Voting Rights Act (1965),” Milestone Documents. Link
- U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, “History of Federal Voting Rights Laws.” Link
- U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, “Introduction to Federal Voting Rights Laws: The Voting Rights Act of 1965.” Link
- Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013). Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School. Link
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