"It Cannot Continue":
Establishing Legal Equality

The civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. and others was the indispensable catalyst for the passage of two new laws of unparalleled importance. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 at last would establish firmly the legal equality of African Americans. They were enacted partly because of a structural transformation of American politics, including the unexpected elevation of a powerful, pro-civil-rights southern president who helped overcome the forces that had defeated earlier civil rights legislation. Above all, support for these laws came from the growing political constituency for change — the millions of Americans horrified by the actions of segregationists in the South.

Changing Politics

Ever since post-Civil War Reconstruction failed to ensure the civil rights of blacks in the American South, two great obstacles had blocked efforts at the national level to end Jim Crow: the political party system and the rules of the U.S. Congress. When the United States acquired vast and potentially slaveholding territories (including California and much of today's American Southwest) in the Mexican War of 1846-1848, the nation's political parties increasingly formulated their positions on sectional lines: Democrats favored the South, and the expansion of slavery; Whigs, and later Republicans, favored the North, opposed the extension of slavery into the newly acquired territories, and often believed that complete abolition was only a matter of time. Whigs and Republicans in this era favored the aggressive use of federal power to promote economic development. Southerners and Democrats — fearing federal action against slavery — favored the supremacy of individual states against a federal government properly limited to only those powers specifically granted by the Constitution. This "states' rights" concept has deep roots in American history. Early in the 19th century, however, it became entangled with the issues of slavery, segregation, and civil rights.

These patterns persisted after the Civil War. As we have seen, the postwar Radical Republicans pressed for a Reconstruction that would ensure African-American rights. After Reconstruction, the "Party of Lincoln" — the Republicans — continued to enjoy the support of most blacks. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, evolved into an alliance of southern segregationists and northern urban residents, often immigrants and industrial workers. As the 20th century progressed, the party's northern wing became more politically liberal, and, with President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal economic policies, more accepting of broad federal powers. Liberal northern Democrats often chafed against southern racism, but their party could not compete nationally without the support of the "solid South."

The rules of the U.S. Senate were another formidable obstacle to civil rights legislation. While passing a bill required only a simple majority, any senator could block a vote simply by declining to stop speaking during Senate debate, refusing to relinquish the floor. At that time, a two-thirds majority of senators could vote "cloture" of debate. In practical terms, then, no significant legislation could pass the Senate without the support of two-thirds of its members. This meant that southern senators, elected in states where blacks were routinely deprived of the right to vote, could — and did — block civil rights bills.

Anti-civil-rights filibusters, as these lengthy senatorial speeches came to be known, blocked much legislation over the years. In 1946, a weeks-long filibuster defeated a bill that enjoyed majority support and would have prevented workplace discrimination. In 1957, Senator Strom Thurmond (then a Democratic senator from South Carolina) filibustered for 24 hours and 18 minutes in an unsuccessful effort to block the mild Civil Rights Act of 1957.

But slowly the constellation of political forces was shifting in ways that would prove helpful to the civil rights movement. The black vote, at least in the North, had grown more important. For most of the nation's history, the overwhelming majority of African Americans resided in the South. During the first half of the 20th century, many African Americans began to move from the South to Chicago and other northern cities. An estimated 6 million blacks would head north during this "Great Migration." The North was not free of racial prejudice, but blacks there could vote, and they became an increasingly attractive target for ambitious politicians.

In 1960, the Democratic candidate for president, Senator John F. Kennedy, was determined to increase his share of the historically Republican African-American vote. When Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed following an Atlanta sit-in, Kennedy phoned King's wife, Coretta Scott King, to offer his sympathy, even as his brother, the future attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy, worked to secure King's release. Freed on bail, King acknowledged a "great debt of gratitude to Senator Kennedy and his family." Kennedy carried an estimated 70 percent of the African-American vote in a tight election in which he prevailed over Republican Vice President Richard M. Nixon by less than 1 percent of the popular vote.

While historians differ over the Kennedy administration's civil rights record, it is not unfair to remark that it was better than that of its 20th-century predecessors, but not as strong as civil rights activists would have liked. John and Robert Kennedy repeatedly urged King not to press too hard. But when King would forge ahead, the Kennedys generally would follow.

As previously described, President Kennedy introduced broad civil rights legislation in the aftermath of the events in Birmingham. With Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, responsibility for that legislation would fall to his vice president and successor, Lyndon Johnson.

Lyndon Baines Johnson

The new president possessed two enormous assets: a singularly powerful personality and a mastery of the procedures and personalities of the U.S. Congress perhaps unparalleled in American history. From 1954 to 1960, Johnson had served, in the words of biographer Robert Dallek, as "the most effective majority leader in Senate history." To his command of the Senate's often arcane rules and traditions, Johnson added what one might call intense powers of personal persuasion. "He'd come on just like a tidal wave," said Johnson's vice president, Hubert Humphrey. "He went through walls. ... He'd take the whole room over."

The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who served as a White House fellow under Johnson, recalled Johnson's ability to focus all his energies on extracting a needed vote from a recalcitrant senator. She called it "The Treatment." King biographer Marshall Frady described it as

... a ferocious manner of persuasion that proceeded by a kind of progressive physical engulfment: wrapping one giant arm around a colleague's shoulder with his other hand clenching his lapel, then straightening the senator's tie knot, then nudging and punching his chest and sticking a forefinger into his shirt. Johnson would lower his face closer and closer to his subject's in escalating exhortation until the man would be bowed backward like a parenthesis mark.

 

Johnson had been born poor in Texas and understood intimately the conditions under which African Americans and Mexican Americans labored. As a congressman and then senator from a southern state, electoral realities obliged Johnson to mute some of his progressive views on civil rights and racial equality. But elevated unexpectedly to the presidency, Johnson placed the full measure of his political skills to work for the passage of the landmark civil rights laws.

As the new president told Richard Russell, an influential senator from Georgia whose opposition to civil rights legislation posed a formidable obstacle: "I'm not going to cavil and I'm not going to compromise. I'm going to pass it just as it is, Dick, and if you get in my way I'm going to run you down. I just want you to know that because I care about you."

The Civil Rights Act of 1964

For nearly a century, many states had managed to escape the obvious meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

 

Court decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education and the many others won by Thurgood Marshall and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People finally established that government, even state governments in the Deep South, could not discriminate against African Americans or anyone else. Activists such as the Freedom Riders, who sought to assert their civil rights, risked their lives, but at least there was no doubt that the law was on their side and that those who attacked them were lawbreakers.

But the owners of a movie theater or a department store lunch counter were not the government. As a result, the civil rights movement was obliged to wage battles one city and one business at a time. While Rosa Parks's brave refusal to move to the back of the bus led to the desegregation of public transportation in Montgomery, Alabama, hundreds or even thousands more Rosa Parks — and Martin Luther Kings — would be needed to achieve this throughout the South.

Plainly, legislation was needed to prohibit acts of private discrimination in public places. Such a law would represent a dramatic expansion of federal authority. The American Constitution explains what the federal — and, in the post-Civil War amendments the state governments — may and may not do. It does not speak of Woolworth's lunch counter.

In the end, proponents of what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would assert, and the courts subsequently would accept, that Congress possessed the authority to ban discrimination in employment, public accommodations, and other aspects of life. They pointed to the constitutional provision (Article I, Section 8) authorizing Congress "to regulate Commerce ... among the several States." By the mid-20th century, nearly every economic transaction involved some form of interstate commerce, were one to look closely enough.

In 1969, the Supreme Court, in Daniel v. Paul, rejected the claim of a discriminatory "entertainment club" that its lack of interstate activity exempted it from the Civil Rights Act. Among its findings: The snack bar served hamburgers and hot dogs on rolls, and the "principal ingredients going into the bread were produced and processed in other States."

President Johnson's introduction of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 provoked one of the nation's great political contests. The act prevailed because much of the nation had looked hard into Bull Connor's eyes and had not liked what it saw. But passage also would require all of Johnson's formidable skills. It was understood that majorities of Republicans and northern Democrats would support the bill, but that Johnson would have to engineer a two-thirds Senate majority to overcome the inevitable fillibuster by southern Democrats.

Johnson, in his first State of the Union Address as president, on January 8, 1964, urged Congress to "let this session ... be known as the session which did more for civil rights than the last hundred sessions combined." The months that followed saw intense congressional fact-finding and debate over the act. The House of Representatives held more than 70 days of public hearings, during which some 275 witnesses offered nearly 6,000 pages of testimony. At the end of this process, the House passed the bill by a vote of 290 to 130.

The Senate filibuster would last for 57 days, during which time the Senate conducted virtually no other business. As the speeches continued (one senator carried a 1,500-page speech onto the floor), President Johnson subjected many a senator to "The Treatment," and a variety of labor, religious, and civil rights groups lobbied for cloture and a final vote. Finally, on June 10, 1964, the Senate voted 71 to 29 to end debate — the first time cloture had ever been successfully invoked in a civil rights matter. A week later, the Senate passed its version of the civil rights bill. On July 2, 1964, the House of Representatives agreed to the Senate version, sending the bill to the White House.

President Johnson affixed his signature that evening, in the course of a nationally televised address. "Americans of every race and color have died in battle to protect our freedom," he told the nation. He added,

Americans of every race and color have worked to build a nation of widening opportunities. Now our generation of Americans has been called on to continue the unending search for justice within our own borders.

We believe that all men are created equal. Yet many are denied equal treatment.

We believe that all men have certain unalienable rights. Yet many Americans do not enjoy those rights.

We believe that all men are entitled to the blessings of liberty. Yet millions are being deprived of those blessings — not because of their own failures, but because of the color of their skin.

The reasons are deeply imbedded in history and tradition and the nature of man. We can understand — without rancor or hatred — how this all happened.

But it cannot continue. Our Constitution, the foundation of our Republic, forbids it. ...The purpose of the law is simple.

It does not restrict the freedom of any American, so long as he respects the rights of others.

It does not give special treatment to any citizen.

It does say the only limit to a man's hope for happiness, and for the future of his children, shall be his own ability.

It does say that there are those who are equal before God shall now also be equal in the polling booths, in the classrooms, in the factories ...

My fellow citizens, we have come now to a time of testing. We must not fail.

Let us close the springs of racial poison. Let us pray for wise and understanding hearts. Let us lay aside irrelevant differences and make our nation whole. Let us hasten that day when our unmeasured strength and our unbounded spirit will be free.

 

The Act's Powers

After two centuries of slavery, segregation, and legal inequality, and the resulting economic disadvantage, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave the federal government and private individuals the legal authority they needed to attack squarely racial (and gender — the act also bars discrimination on the basis of sex) discrimination.

This authority is spelled out in broad provisions, called "titles." The major points include: Title I, which abolished unequal application of voter registration requirements.

Title II, which prohibited discrimination in public accommodations. The title authorized individuals to file lawsuits to obtain injunctive relief (a court order ordering someone to do or not to do something) and allowed the attorney general of the United States to intervene in those lawsuits he deemed "of general public importance."

Title III, which authorized the U.S. attorney general to file a lawsuit, provided the case would "materially further the orderly progress of desegregation in public facilities," where an aggrieved person was unable himself or herself to maintain such a suit.

Title IV, which authorized the attorney general to file suit to force the desegregation of public schools. This provision aimed to accelerate the slow progress made during the decade since Brown v. Board of Education.

Title VI, which extended the act's provisions to "any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance." It authorized the federal government to withhold federal funds from any such program that practiced discrimination.

Title VII, which prohibited employment discrimination by any business employing more than 25 people. It established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to review complaints of discrimination in recruitment, hiring, compensation, and advancement.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965: The Background

Court decisions and civil rights statutes were crucial tools in establishing, protecting, and enforcing the civil rights of African Americans. The surest way to guarantee the permanence of these rights, however, was to empower blacks politically to assert themselves as full participants in the democratic system. The right to vote, then, was arguably the most fundamental right of all, and one that, practically speaking, African Americans in the South had not enjoyed since the failure of Reconstruction.

Looking back, after the withdrawal of northern armies from the South in 1877, white southern elites re-imposed their political dominance. Suppressing the African-American vote was crucial to this objective and was achieved by a number of methods. At first, raw violence was the preferred tool. A number of other practices developed.

One such practice was the "poll tax." This was a special tax levied equally on every member of a community. Citizens who failed to pay were deemed ineligible to vote. Many southern states introduced poll taxes between 1889 and 1910. Given the extent of African-American poverty, the poll tax disenfranchised large numbers of black voters, and poor whites as well. The Twenty-Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (1964) prohibited denying any citizen the right to vote in an election for federal office for failure to pay a poll tax. A Supreme Court decision two years later extended this prohibition to state and local elections.

Another practice was the "literacy requirement" for voter registration. Highly subjective oral and written examinations nearly always were applied with special vigor to African-American applicants. Some states would not even permit an applicant to take the examination unless an already-registered voter would vouch for him or her. It was nearly impossible for many black applicants even to take the test, since there were very few African Americans on the southern voting rolls, and few southern whites would risk social ostracism or worse to vouch-in a prospective black voter. The examination was often blatantly unfair. It might require an applicant to write out a passage from the Constitution as dictated by the county registrar — dictated clearly to white applicants, mumbled to blacks.

Southern election officials adopted any number of tactics to prevent black applicants from qualifying. In Alabama, for instance, the decision whether an applicant passed or failed was made in secret, and there was no method for challenging the decisions. Not surprisingly, at least one Alabama board of registrars "qualified" each and every white applicant and not a single black. Whatever tactic was employed, the threat of violence always lurked in the background. Election officials might publish in local newspapers the names of black voter applicants. This alerted local white Citizens Councils and Ku Klux Klan chapters to blacks who might need to be "persuaded" to withdraw their applications.

Against this background of violent intimidation, activists from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality, among others, launched voter registration campaigns in rural and heavily black parts of the Deep South in 1961. The work took incredible courage. As an early volunteer, the plantation worker Fannie Lou Hamer, memorably explained: "I guess if I'd had any sense, I'd have been scared — but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they [white people] could do was kill me, and it seemed they'd been trying to do that a little at a time since I could remember."

In 1964, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Congress of Racial Equality, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee launched the "Freedom Summer." More than 1,000 northern whites, mostly college students, volunteered to travel to Mississippi and help black voters register. Their presence also was intended to draw national attention to the violent suppression of black voting rights.

On June 21, the very first day of Freedom Summer, the volunteers achieved this goal in a tragic manner. Three civil rights workers, African American James Chaney and two white Jewish Americans, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, were reported missing and later found murdered. Their murder forced Americans to confront more directly the related issues of voting rights and violence. While the brave volunteers persuaded some 17,000 equally brave African Americans to complete voter registration applications, election officials ultimately accepted fewer than 10 percent of these. Blacks, more and more Americans understood, comprised nearly half of Mississippi's population but only 5 percent of its registered voters.

Bloody Sunday in Selma

The following year, civil rights organizations launched a registration drive in Selma, Alabama, a small city about 50 miles west of Montgomery. There were about 15,000 blacks residing in Selma, but only 350 had successfully registered to vote. At a February 1965 voting rights rally in nearby Marion, police shot and killed a young black man named Jimmie Lee Jackson.

In response, activists called a March 7 march from Selma to the Alabama state capitol at Montgomery. Led by John Lewis of SNCC and Martin Luther King's aide, the Reverend Hosea Williams, some 525 marchers were met on the Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River by Alabama state troopers and local lawmen. They had gas masks at hand and nightsticks at the ready. The trooper leader (Major John Cloud) ordered the marchers to return to their church. Reverend Williams answered: "May we have a word with the major?" "There is no word to be had," came the reply.

The suppression of the march, the New York Times reported, "was swift and thorough." The paper described a flying wedge of troopers and recounted how "the first 10 or 20 Negroes were swept to the ground screaming, arms and legs flying." With the news media on hand and recording their actions for a horrified national audience, the troopers fired tear gas canisters. Local law enforcement pursued the retreating protestors with whips and nightsticks. "I was hit in the head by a state trooper with a nightstick ... I thought I saw death," said Lewis, hospitalized with a concussion.

For millions of Americans, March 7, 1965, would be known simply as Bloody Sunday. Typical was the reaction of U.S. Representative James G. O'Hara of Michigan, who called the day's events "a savage action, storm-trooper style, under direction of a reckless demagogue [a reference to Alabama's governor, George Wallace]."

From Atlanta, Martin Luther King announced that he and Ralph Abernathy would lead a second Selma-to-Montgomery march that Tuesday. He called on "religious leaders from all over the nation to join us on Tuesday in our peaceful, nonviolent march for freedom." Before the march could occur, a federal judge, not unfriendly to the activists but determined to hold hearings before acting, issued a court order temporarily forbidding the march.

King was under intense political pressure from every corner. Federal officials urged him to delay the march. With the judge's injunction now in place, King and his followers would be the lawbreakers should the march proceed. But younger activists, many affiliated with Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, wanted to move faster. King risked losing his place at the head of the movement were he unable to satisfy their demands.

On March 9, King and Abernathy led some 3,000 followers — his black followers as well as hundreds of white religious leaders — on the second Selma-to-Montgomery march. Troopers again met them at the Pettus Bridge. The marchers stopped, then sang the movement's anthem: "We Shall Overcome." The group then prayed, and Abernathy thanked God for the marchers who "came to present their bodies as a living sacrifice." King then directed his followers to turn back. "As a nonviolent, I couldn't move people into a potentially violent situation," he told the Washington Post.

King's decision disappointed some of the more zealous activists. But King had been conferring quietly with federal officials. The events of Bloody Sunday also had exerted great pressure on an already sympathetic President Johnson. Too many Americans at long last had seen enough. From religious groups and state legislatures, youthful protestors and members of Congress, the demand for federal action was growing. The two leaders appear to have struck a tacit bargain: King would not violate the injunction, and the Johnson administration quietly suggested it would soon be lifted.

On March 15, Johnson introduced the legislation that would become the Voting Rights Act. Addressing the nation that night, President Johnson employed the plainest of language in the service of a basic American value — the right to vote:

There is no Negro problem. There is no southern problem. There is no northern problem. There is only an American problem.

And we are met here tonight as Americans ... to solve that problem.

The Constitution says that no person shall be kept from voting because of his race or his color. We have all sworn an oath before God to support and to defend that Constitution.

We must now act in obedience to that oath. ...

There is no constitutional issue here. The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong — deadly wrong — to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of States rights or National rights. There is only the struggle for human rights. ...

What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and State of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.

Their cause must be our cause too, because it is not just Negroes but really it is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.

 

Two days later, the federal court lifted the injunction against the marchers. U.S. District Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. further ordered that state and county authorities not interfere and indeed take affirmative measures to protect the activists. "The law is clear," the judge wrote, "that the right to petition one's government for the redress of grievances may be exercised in large groups ... and these rights may be exercised by marching, even along public highways."

The Selma-to-Montgomery March

By March 21, thousands of Americans from all walks of life began to assemble in Selma for the third Selma-to-Montgomery march. The marchers planned to cover the entire 87-kilometer route over the course of five days and four nights, with marchers sleeping under the stars. The route they followed is today a National Historic Trail.

With the support of the Johnson administration and an aroused American people, the difference from the earlier efforts could not be more apparent. Major John Cloud of the Alabama State Troopers had ordered the beatings and gassings two weeks earlier. Now he was obliged to occupy the lead car accompanying the protestors across the Pettus Bridge. Federal military police were on hand to provide protection, and elements of the Alabama National Guard were temporarily placed under federal command. As more than 3,000 marchers began the first leg of their quest, Abernathy told them, "When we get to Montgomery, we are going to go up to Governor Wallace's door and say, 'George, it's all over now. We've got the ballot.' "

"Walk together, children," King instructed, "and don't you get weary, and it will lead us to a Promised Land."

The New York Times offered this description of the crowd as it set out along U.S. Highway 80:

There were civil rights leaders and rabbis, pretty coeds and bearded representatives of the student left, movie stars and infants in strollers. There were two blind people and a man with one leg. But mostly there were the Negroes who believe they have been denied the vote too long.

 

The marchers covered a bit over 11 kilometers that first day, then pitched two large circus tents and slept in sleeping bags and blankets. The next morning King announced: "I am happy to say that I have slept in a sleeping bag for the first time in my life. I feel fine." By the second day, though, blisters and sunburn were common.

Because the highway narrowed in rural areas, the federal court had ruled that only 300 marchers could participate until the road widened again outside Montgomery. But a fair number of "extras" chose to tag along, even during the third day, which was marked by torrential rains. The marchers responded in song; among their selections: "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me 'Round" and "We Shall Overcome."

King briefly left the march to deliver a long scheduled address in Cleveland, Ohio. There King made explicit his debt to Mahatma Gandhi, whose famous march to the sea anticipated the Selma-to-Montgomery trek. "We are challenged to make the world one in terms of brotherhood," King said. "We must learn to live together as brothers, or we will all perish as fools."

As the marchers approached Montgomery, the crowd swelled to 25,000 or more. They came by chartered plane, by bus, and by rail. A delegation of leading American historians arrived to participate in the final leg. They issued a statement: "We believe it is high time for the issues over which the Civil War was fought to be finally resolved." The singer and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte enlisted an all-star group of Hollywood entertainers.

On March 25, with Martin Luther King at the head, the activists entered Montgomery. They marched up Dexter Avenue, tracing the path traversed a century ago by the inaugural parade of Jefferson Davis, first and only president of the Confederate States of America, the would-be nation whose championing of slavery sparked the Civil War. Now, a century later, the descendants of black slaves approached the state house to demand the rights to which they had long been entitled, and long been denied. Their petition read:

We have come not only five days and 50 miles [80 kilometers], but we have come from three centuries of suffering and hardship. We have come to you, the Governor of Alabama, to declare that we must have our freedom NOW. We must have the right to vote; we must have equal protection of the law, and an end to police brutality.

 

Governor Wallace had already fled the scene. It didn't matter.

King delivered that day one of his most famous speeches, one in which he quoted a 70-year-old participant in the Montgomery bus boycott. Asked one day whether she would not have preferred riding to walking, Mother Pollard replied: "My feets is tired, but my soul is rested."

The just concluded march, King said, was "a shining moment in the conscience of man." He singled out as honorable and inspiring "the pilgrimage of clergymen and laymen of every race and faith pouring into Selma to face danger at the side of its embattled Negroes. Like an idea whose time has come," King continued, "not even the marching of mighty armies can halt us. We are moving to the land of freedom."

We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. That will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man.

I know you are asking today, "How long will it take?" I come to say to you this afternoon however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because truth pressed to earth will rise again.

How long? Not long, because no lie can live forever.

How long? Not long, because you still reap what you sow.

How long? Not long. Because the arm of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.

 

The Voting Rights Act Enacted

Five months later, the Congress passed and President Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Shortly before noon on August 6, 1965, Johnson drove to the U.S. Capitol building. Waiting for him were the leaders of Congress and of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis among them. In signing the act into law, Johnson told the nation:

The central fact of American civilization ... is that freedom and justice and the dignity of man are not just words to us. We believe in them. Under all the growth, and the tumult, and abundance, we believe. And so, as long as some among us are oppressed and we are part of that oppression, it must blunt our faith and sap the strength of our high purpose.

Thus this is a victory for the freedom of the American Negro, but it is also a victory for the freedom of the American nation. And every family across this great entire searching land will live stronger in liberty, will live more splendid in expectation, and will be prouder to be American because of the act that you have passed that I will sign today.

 

What the Act Does

The Fifteenth Amendment already barred racial discrimination in voting rights, so the problem was not that African Americans lacked the legal right to vote. It was that some state and local officials had systematically deprived blacks of those rights. The Voting Rights Act accordingly authorized the federal government to assume control of the voter registration process in any state or voting district that had in 1964 employed a literacy or other qualifying test and in which fewer than half of voting age residents had either registered or voted. Six entire southern states were thus "covered," as were a number of counties in several other states. Covered jurisdictions were prohibited from modifying their voting rules and regulations without first affording federal officials the opportunity to review the change for discriminatory intent or effect. Other provisions barred the future use of literacy tests and directed the attorney general of the United States to commence legal action to end the use of poll taxes in state elections. (The Twenty-Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in January 1964, already barred the poll tax in elections for federal office.)

The introduction of federal "examiners" ended the mass intimidation of potential minority voters. The results were dramatic. By the end of 1965, the five states of the Deep South alone registered 160,000 new African-American voters. By 2000, African-American registration rates trailed that of whites by only 2 percent. In the South, where in 1965 only two African Americans served either in the U.S. Congress or a state legislature, the number today is 160.

The Voting Rights Act was originally enacted for a five-year period, but it has been both extended and expanded to introduce new requirements, such as the provision of bilingual election materials.

In 1982, President Ronald Reagan signed a 25-year extension: "The right to vote is the crown jewel of American liberties," he said, "and we will not see its luster diminished." President George W. Bush signed another 25-year extension in 2006.