Voting Rights Act of 1965: Protecting Black Voters in the US

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a landmark United States law that banned racial discrimination in voting. Signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson on 6 August 1965, it suspended literacy tests and placed elections in much of the South under federal oversight. It transformed Black political participation within a few years and is widely regarded as one of the most effective civil rights laws in American history.

Background: the vote denied

The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, declared that the right to vote could not be denied because of race. After Reconstruction ended in 1877, however, Southern states found ways around it. Poll taxes, literacy and “understanding” tests, white-only primaries, complex registration procedures and intimidation drove most Black citizens off the voter rolls.

Earlier civil rights laws in 1957, 1960 and 1964 relied mainly on lawsuits brought case by case, which were slow and easy to obstruct. By 1964 only about 7 per cent of eligible Black adults in Mississippi were registered. Campaigns such as Freedom Summer exposed the violence used to keep it that way.

Selma and the push for a law

The decisive pressure came from the Selma to Montgomery marches in Alabama. On 7 March 1965, Bloody Sunday, state troopers attacked peaceful marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and television brought the scenes into American homes.

On 15 March Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress. He described the denial of the vote to Black Americans as a national wrong and ended with the words of the movement’s anthem, “we shall overcome”. Two days later his administration sent the bill to Congress. It had been drafted largely by the Justice Department under Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, with input from Senate Republican leader Everett Dirksen, whose support was needed to defeat a filibuster by Southern senators.

Passage through Congress

The Senate passed the bill by 77 votes to 19 on 26 May 1965 after closing debate. The House approved its version by 333 to 85 on 9 July. After a conference resolved differences, mainly over whether to ban poll taxes outright, both chambers passed the final bill in early August, and Johnson signed it on 6 August.

He chose the President’s Room of the Capitol, where Abraham Lincoln had signed a law in 1861 freeing enslaved people forced to work for the Confederacy. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and John Lewis were among the guests.

Key provisions

• Section 2 banned any voting qualification or procedure that denied or limited the right to vote on account of race, everywhere in the country.
• Section 4 set a coverage formula. States and counties that used a test or device for voting in November 1964 and where less than half the voting-age population was registered or voted in the 1964 presidential election were covered. Literacy tests were suspended there.
• Section 5 required covered jurisdictions to obtain “preclearance” from the Attorney General or the federal court in Washington, D.C., before changing any voting law or procedure.
• Sections 6 to 8 allowed federal examiners to register voters and federal observers to watch elections.
• Section 10 instructed the Attorney General to challenge poll taxes in state elections in court.

The formula initially covered Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Virginia, together with many counties in North Carolina and a few areas elsewhere.

Impact on Southern voting

The effect was dramatic. Federal examiners went into Southern counties within days, and in the first months after the act about a quarter of a million new Black voters were registered. In Mississippi, Black registration rose from about 7 per cent in 1964 to roughly 60 per cent by 1967. In 1966 the Supreme Court struck down poll taxes in state elections in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections.

The number of Black elected officials in the South grew from a handful in 1965 to thousands by the 1980s. Southern politics was reshaped as white candidates began appealing to Black voters, and party loyalties shifted across the region.

The Supreme Court upheld the act in South Carolina v. Katzenbach (1966), ruling that Congress could use strong remedies to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment.

Key people

• Lyndon B. Johnson, the Texan president who had already signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and used his long experience of Congress to push the bill through. He reportedly expected it to cost the Democrats support among white Southern voters, and party allegiances in the region did shift over the following decades.
• Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, whose Selma campaign forced the issue onto the national agenda.
• John Lewis, Hosea Williams, Amelia Boynton and the many local activists of SNCC and Alabama’s voters’ leagues, who had organised registration drives for years before national attention arrived.
• Nicholas Katzenbach, the Attorney General whose Justice Department drafted the bill and then enforced it.
• Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader in the Senate, whose backing helped secure the votes to end the Southern filibuster. Strong support from both parties, outside the South, was essential to passage.

Renewals and expansion

Several sections were temporary, and Congress extended them repeatedly. A 1970 renewal suspended literacy tests nationwide, a ban made permanent in 1975. That same year coverage was extended to protect language minorities, including Hispanic, Native American, Asian American and Alaska Native citizens. In 1982, after a Supreme Court ruling had made Section 2 claims harder to win, Congress clarified that practices with discriminatory results were unlawful. In 2006 the act was renewed for 25 years by large majorities, with the Senate voting 98 to 0.

Shelby County v. Holder and after

In Shelby County v. Holder, decided on 25 June 2013, the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that the Section 4(b) coverage formula was unconstitutional. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said the formula was based on decades-old data and no longer reflected current conditions. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in dissent, argued that the preclearance system was still preventing discrimination and should not have been discarded because it was working.

Without a coverage formula, preclearance ceased to operate. Several formerly covered states soon introduced new voting rules, such as stricter identification requirements, prompting fresh lawsuits under Section 2. In Allen v. Milligan (2023) the Court upheld the use of Section 2 to require an additional majority-Black congressional district in Alabama. Proposals in Congress to restore preclearance have not become law.

Timeline

• 1870, 3 February: The Fifteenth Amendment is ratified.
• 1965, 7 March: Bloody Sunday on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.
• 1965, 15 March: Johnson calls for a voting rights law before Congress.
• 1965, 26 May: The Senate passes the bill, 77–19.
• 1965, 9 July: The House passes its version, 333–85.
• 1965, 6 August: Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act.
• 1966, 7 March: The Supreme Court upholds the act in South Carolina v. Katzenbach.
• 2006, 27 July: President George W. Bush signs a 25-year renewal.
• 2013, 25 June: Shelby County v. Holder strikes down the coverage formula.

Why it matters

The Voting Rights Act turned the promise of the Fifteenth Amendment into reality for millions of Black Americans, building on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Its history, from Selma to the Shelby County ruling, remains at the centre of American debates about how to protect the right to vote.