What effect did the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 have on national party politics?

White men, age 21 and older, who owned property were given the right to vote in 1776.

The 15th Amendment to the Constitution removed racial barriers to voting in 1870, but states continued to practice voter discrimination and continued to deny Black voters a chance to participate in elections.

The right to vote was extended to white women in 1920.

It wasn't until 1965, after years of intimidation, murders, and advocacy that the path to the voting booth was cleared for Black people with the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The right to vote, regardless of race

Just eight days after Martin Luther King, Jr. led a peaceful civil rights march in Selma, Alabama, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced his intention to pass a federal Voting Rights Act to ensure that no federal, state, or local government could in any way impede people from voting because of their race or ethnicity. He signed the Voting Rights Act into law later that year, banning racial discriminatory practices in voting, including literacy tests.

Provisions of the Voting Rights Act

Originally, legislators hoped that within five years of its passage, the issues surrounding the 1965 Voting Rights Act would be resolved and there would be no further need for its enforcement-related provisions. They were wrong. Congress had to extend these provisions in 1970, 1975, 1982 and most recently in 2007, this time for 25 years.

Enforcement measures included:

Requirements for certain jurisdictions with a history of disenfranchising voters to obtain approval or "preclearance" from the U.S. Department of Justice or the U.S/ District Court in D.C. before they can make any changes to voting practices or procedures. They must prove that the proposed change does not denying or infringe on the right to vote on account of race or color.
Requirements for certain jurisdictions to provide language assistance to voters in communities where there is a concentration of citizens who do aren't proficient in English to actively participate in the electoral process. This provision was added to the Voting Rights Act in 1975.
Federal election examiners and observers for certain jurisdictions where there is evidence of attempts to intimidate minority voters at the polls.

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.

- President Lyndon B. Johnson (1965)

U.S. Congress. H.R. 7152 in the House of Representative 88th Congress, 2nd Session, February 10, 1964. Printed document. NAACP Records, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (162.00.00)

With the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the federal government offered its immense power to the struggle to realize a more just and inclusive American society that had begun a century earlier with Reconstruction. But passage of the act was not the end of the story. The act did not fulfill all of the goals of civil rights activists. It would take further grassroots mobilization, judicial precedent, and legislative action to guarantee civil rights for African Americans.

In response to a new wave of protest, the U.S. Congress soon followed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The act focused on redressing the legacy of discrimination against African Americans’ access to the ballot. The acts were swiftly tested in court and ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court in a variety of decisions beginning in 1964.

Emboldened by these remarkable achievements, other groups marginalized by discrimination have organized to assert their rights. Since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, disenfranchised Americans have used it to challenge discrimination and harassment based upon race, national origin, religion, gender, and more.

See timeline for this period

In the 1964 presidential election President Lyndon Johnson ran against Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), the Republican candidate. Senator Richard Russell, Jr., (D-GA) warned Johnson that his strong support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “will not only cost you the South, it will cost you the election.” Johnson went on to win the presidency, in a landslide victory, by more than fifteen million votes. He captured ninety-four percent of the black vote. Goldwater won his native state of Arizona and five states in the Deep South.

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The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) was organized during Freedom Summer of 1964 by Robert Moses, Aaron Henry, and David Dennis of CORE, and Amzie Moore of the NAACP. The party was designed to serve as an alternative to Mississippi’s all-white Democratic Party. MFDP delegates went to the Democratic National Convention in August 1964 to demand to be seated in place of the regular delegation, which President Johnson feared would prompt the Southern states to walk out. He sent Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale to offer the MFDP a compromise calling for two black delegates to be seated alongside the white delegates. MFDP refused the offer and walked out of the convention disillusioned. Thereafter, SNCC and MFDP found other ways to achieve political power.

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[Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party]. A Primer for Delegates to the Democratic National Convention Who Haven’t Heard about the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, [1964]. James Forman Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (201.00.00)

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Civil rights activist Sam Mahone ( b. 1945) remembers testing the Civil Rights Act at a restaurant in Albany, Georgia, the day after it passed in an interview conducted by Hasan Kwame Jeffries (b. 1973) for the Civil Rights History Project in 2013.

The Civil Rights Movement produced a new generation of writers, artists, dramatists, and directors. Racial appreciation through art, history and culture was the beginning of the Black Arts Movement. There was a founding of writers’ groups, community theaters, literary magazines, and small presses nation-wide. Early participants included actors Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and Robert Hooks, artists Margaret Burroughs and Elmer Lewis, and playwrights Ted Shine and LeRoi Jones. Jones, who later changed his name to Amiri Baraka, wrote the controversial play Dutchman about black and white relations in the North. It premiered at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York and received the 1964 Obie Award for Best American Play. Shown here is a Howard University Theater playbill for the play’s production.

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The Drama Department Howard University Players Present “Dutchman” Le Roi Jones’ Comedy Melodrama on Negro, White Relations in the North and “Sho is Hot in The Cotton Patch” Ted Shine’s Satire on Negro, White Relations in the South. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Theater Company, ca. 1968. Playbill. Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress (206.00.00) Courtesy of Howard University

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Francis Herman Flach (1922−2000), father of Randa Jo Downs, was an employee of the Department of Education, Health and Welfare. After the Civil Rights Act was passed, he investigated complaints of violations of Title VI in hospitals. He traveled throughout the South to instruct hospital administrators on how to desegregate their facilities. In the summer of 1964, at the age of fourteen, Randa Jo accompanied her father and his African American coworker on one of these trips to Little Rock, Arkansas, which she recounts in this letter.

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Randa Jo Downs to the Voices of Civil Rights Project, February 2004. Letter. Voices of Civil Rights Project Collection, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress (276.00.00) Courtesy of Randa Jo Downs

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Civil rights activist Purcell Conway (b. 1948) discusses testing the Civil Rights Act immediately after it was passed at the beaches in St. Augustine, Florida, in an interview conducted by Joseph Mosnier (b. 1962) for the Civil Rights History Project in 2011.

In January 1965 Martin Luther King Jr., President of SCLC, launched a campaign to secure the right to vote in Selma, Alabama, following an unsuccessful voter registration drive begun by SNCC in 1963. At a February rally in nearby Marion, state troopers killed twenty-six-year-old Jimmy Lee Jackson. Afterward, King proposed a protest march from Selma to Montgomery. On March 7, five-hundred marchers led by SCLC’s Hosea Williams and SNCC’s John Lewis were attacked by state troopers and posse men at the Edmund Pettus Bridge with tear gas, whips, and billy clubs. The violence, televised before a national audience, would be known as “Bloody Sunday.” On March 9, King and Ralph Abernathy led marchers who were turned around by state troopers across the bridge. The successful Selma to Montgomery March finally began on March 21 and concluded on March 25, where approximately 25,000 marchers, black and white, assembled at the Alabama State Capitol.

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James Forman, Executive Secretary, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. [Report on the march from Selma to Montgomery], Alabama, March 7, 1965. Typescript. Page 2 - Page 3 - Page 4 - Page 5 - Page 6. James Forman Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (279.00.00)

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The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights was created by the Civil Rights Act of 1957 as an independent, bipartisan, fact-finding federal agency. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 extended the life of the commission and allowed it to investigate alleged vote fraud. In these excerpts from a documentary produced for the commission on hearings conducted February 16–20, 1965, in Jackson, Mississippi, the commission, after being welcomed by Mississippi Governor Paul B. Johnson, Jr., (D-MS) questions the registrar of a county where no African American had successfully registered to vote during his tenure. Civil rights activist Unita Blackwell (b. 1933), who later became the first African American woman mayor in Mississippi, also testifies.

Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division.

On March 15, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress to urge the passage of a voting rights bill in response to Martin Luther King Jr.’s campaign in Selma, Alabama. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 provided direct federal enforcement to remove literacy tests and other devices that had been used to disenfranchise African Americans. It authorized the appointment of federal registrars to register voters and observe elections. It also prevented states from changing voter requirements and gerrymandering districts for a period of five years without federal review. The poll tax, a point of dispute, was fully banned in 1966. The percentage of black adults registered to vote in the South increased from thirty-five percent in 1964 to almost sixty-five percent by 1969.

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