Brief History of the Voting Rights Act
President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on August 6th 1965. The law was designed to reverse years of African-American disenfranchisement in this country. Despite the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which had given Black men and women the right to vote, southern voter registration boards used poll taxes, literacy tests, and other bureaucratic impediments to deny African Americans their legal rights. Southern blacks also risked harassment, intimidation, economic reprisals, and physical violence when they tried to register or vote. The Voting Rights Act grew out of public protest, which culminated in the Selma to Montgomery marches of 1965. At the first of these three marches--known as Bloody Sunday--state troopers attacked the peaceful demonstrators with billy clubs, tear gas, and bull whips on the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama.
The Voting Rights Act was signed later that year and empowered the federal government to oversee voter registration and elections in counties that had used tests to determine voter eligibility or where registration or turnout had been less than 50% percent in the 1964 presidential election. The act also banned discriminatory literacy tests and expanded voting rights for non-English speaking Americans. At the time the law was enacted, there were three black members of Congress. Today there are forty-three. There are also twenty-five Latino House members and one Latino Senators compared with five members of Congress in 1965.
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