Glossary on the Republic

Voting Rights Act

Voting

The most effective civil rights law in American history was written in the blood of a single day on a single bridge. After Selma, the country could no longer look away.

We shall overcome.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was the law that finally gave teeth to the Fifteenth Amendment's 95-year-old promise that the vote could not be denied by race. It banned the literacy tests and other devices that Southern states had used for generations to keep Black citizens from the ballot.

It was forced into being by violence the nation could see. On March 7, 1965, civil rights marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, were beaten by state troopers in an attack broadcast across the country. The day became known as Bloody Sunday.

The outrage moved the country and the Congress. President Lyndon Johnson, invoking the movement's own anthem, told a joint session we shall overcome, and pushed the bill through. He signed the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965.

Its effect was immediate and historic. Federal oversight of elections in places with a history of discrimination sent Black voter registration soaring across the South within a few years, transforming American politics. Later Supreme Court decisions, however, weakened key enforcement provisions.

Origin

The 1965 law banning racial barriers to voting; passed after the Selma march of Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965.

Why it matters

The Voting Rights Act is proof that law can deliver what principle alone could not, but only when people forced the issue at terrible cost. The promise of the vote regardless of race was written in 1870 and broken for a century. It became real only after Selma, which is why the fight to protect voting rights is never treated as finished history, but as a guard that must be kept.