President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in a ceremony in the President's Room near the Senate Chambers on Aug. 6 | AP Photo LBJ signs Voting Rights Act, Aug. 6, 1965

On this day in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, which sought to lift long-standing impediments against blacks that blocked them from voting in some federal, state and local elections. It was meant to put teeth into the 15th Amendment, ratified by Congress in 1870.

In a speech to Congress on March 15, 1965, Johnson had outlined the devious ways in which election officials systematically denied blacks their voting rights in certain states that were then only beginning to shed their post-slavery segregationist practices.


Two days later, the legislation was introduced in Congress under the joint sponsorship of Sens. Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.), the majority leader, and Everett McKinley Dirksen (R-Ill.) the minority leader, both of whom had worked with Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to draft the bill’s original language.

Although Democrats held two-thirds of the seats in both chambers of Congress after the 1964 Senate elections, Johnson, worried that Southern Democrats would filibuster the legislation, enlisted Dirksen to help gain Republican support. Initially, Dirksen did not intend to support voting rights legislation so soon after having supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but he expressed willingness to accept "revolutionary" legislation after learning about the police violence against protest marchers in Selma on “Bloody Sunday.”

At the time, African-Americans attempting to vote were often told by election officials that they had gotten the date, time or polling place wrong, that the officials were late or absent, that they possessed insufficient literacy skills or had filled out an application incorrectly. Blacks would often be required to take difficult literacy tests, which they inevitably failed.

The president also told Congress that voting supervisors had been known to require black voters to “recite the entire Constitution or explain the most complex provisions of state laws.” Even some blacks with college degrees were turned away from the polls.

Playbook PM Sign up for our must-read newsletter on what's driving the afternoon in Washington. Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Initial state and local enforcement of the new law proved weak. At times, the law was ignored in districts with a high proportion of black voters, where their ability to vote in large numbers threatened the political status quo.

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, convinced that the civil rights movement was permeated with subversives, withheld essential federal investigatory resources. Still, the act gave African-American voters the legal means to challenge voting restrictions and, in time, vastly improved voter turnout. In Mississippi alone, voter turnout among blacks increased from 6 percent in 1964 to 59 percent in 1969.

The initial coverage formula under the act was designed to target jurisdictions that the federal government found were engaged in egregious voting discrimination. Congress updated the formula in 1970 and 1975. In Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court in 2003 struck down the coverage formula as unconstitutional, reasoning that it was no longer responsive to current conditions.

SOURCE: “QUIET REVOLUTION IN THE SOUTH: THE IMPACT OF THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT, 1965–1990,” BY CHANDLER DAVIDSON (1994)

