US Voting Rights Act
President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, prohibiting discriminatory voting practices
August 06, 1965
Barriers at the Ballot Box
Despite the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 guaranteeing Black Americans the right to vote, Southern states had spent nearly a century erecting barriers to prevent them from exercising that right. Poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and outright violence kept Black voters away from the polls. As late as 1964, in some Alabama counties where Black residents were the majority, not a single Black voter was registered. The civil rights movement targeted voting rights as essential to all other freedoms — without the vote, Black citizens could not change the laws that oppressed them.
Selma and Bloody Sunday
In early 1965, civil rights leaders organized a march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital in Montgomery to demand voting rights. On March 7, 1965 — later known as Bloody Sunday — state troopers attacked peaceful marchers with clubs and tear gas on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Television cameras captured the violence and broadcast it into living rooms across America. The brutal images shocked the nation and built irresistible pressure for federal action. President Lyndon Johnson addressed Congress days later, pledging federal legislation to protect voting rights.
A Law That Transformed Democracy
President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law on August 6, 1965. It banned discriminatory voting practices and authorized federal oversight of elections in states with a history of discrimination. The results were immediate and dramatic. Black voter registration in the South surged within months, and Black candidates began winning elections across the region for the first time since Reconstruction. The act has been reauthorized multiple times and remains a landmark of American democracy. Use the date calculator to measure the decades since this pivotal law was signed.