Wednesday, 06 August 2025 marks the 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, the crowning achievement of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. But, more than half a century past the signing ceremony, the Act is often only vaguely understood, as are the events leading to its introduction and passage.
A Violent Day in Selma
The precipitating event for the Voting Rights Act occurred six months earlier in Selma, Alabama. For years before, Civil Rights activists had drawn a great deal of attention to the systemic disenfranchisement of African Americans. Jim Crow laws introduced in the wake of Reconstruction had imposed barriers such as poll taxes and literacy tests to hamper newly free black voters’ access to the polls and, when those proved insufficient, outright intimidation and violence was used to both keep African Americans from daring to exercise their rights and punish those who did.
Even after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which tried to require equal enforcement of “qualification” of voters, entrenched powers in the deep South managed to suppress the African American vote to a fraction of its total potential. To draw attention to the issue, activists, including Hosea Williams of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, planned a march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery. Selma was a deliberate choice: a bastion of white-supremacist politics in Dallas County, the town had a history of voter suppression by Sherriff Jim Clark and his “volunteers”, supported by the local government and judiciary. Even after the 1964 CRA, only 2% of Dallas County’s registered voters were black, despite African Americans comprising 50% of the County’s population.
The powers that be in Dallas County weren’t inclined to make progress easy. In the summer of 1964, local judge James Harre banned any gatherings under the leadership of three civil rights organizations (the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or the Dallas County Voters League) or 41 individually named civil rights activists. This did suppress public activism for a short time, though Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr’s defiance of the ban in January 1965 helped re-invigorate the local efforts. Sherriff Jim Clark persisted, however, and he used extreme measures.
Between January and March, crackdowns on peaceful activism by police and “volunteer posses” (local white men deputized by Clark) caused significant economic damage to Selma’s African American population, as well as over 3,000 arrests and at least one death: that of Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was beaten and shot while trying to protect his mother and grandmother from a police beating following the breakup of another protest in the nearby town of Marion (his murderer, State Trooper James Bonard Fowler, would not be indicted for the crime until 2007). But this time, the black population of Selma was not backing down, and the weight of the nation-wide Civil Rights Movement was behind them.
The planned march occurred on Sunday, 07 March 1965. An estimated 600 protestors gathered outside a local church, prayed, and began walking, in silence and two-by-two, down the city’s streets. But when they attempted to exit the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and thus leave Selma, they were confronted by Major John Cloud. Cloud led a sizable force: more than 150 Alabama State Troopers, sheriff’s deputies, and possemen. Cloud gave a two-minute warning to disperse, but the armed posse advanced one minute and five seconds later, throwing tear gas cannisters and beating the assembled protestors with clubs and bullwhips.
The consequences from Selma were horrific: John Lewis was beaten, suffered a skull fracture, and bore the scars on his head for the rest of his life; coordinator Amelia Boynton was left unconscious in the middle of the road; and 14-year-old Lynda Blackmon Lowery was beaten so severely she required stiches in both the front and back of her head. In the end, at least 17 protestors were hospitalized, and more than 50 injured in the event, which quickly became known as “Bloody Sunday”. And all of this had been captured by media photographers and video cameras.
At 9:30 pm, ABC interrupted the television premiere of Judgement at Nuremberg to air the first footage of the Selma violence. It was not the first time news media had captured police brutality or even become victims of it themselves – NBC correspondent Richard Valeriani had been hospitalized following the brutal dispersal that had killed Jimmy Lee Jackson, and two United Press International photographers had been beaten and their cameras destroyed. But the scale of the violence, and the immediate, obvious comparison to the Nazi atrocities the interrupted film depicted was not lost on the nearly 50 million Americans who saw the broadcast that night.
A National Response
The news-watchers’ horror was not the only reaction to Bloody Sunday. Civil Rights activists flooded into Alabama, or engaged in sit-ins or other acts of civil disobedience. New marches, under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., kept Selma in the national attention; the last one on 25 March 1965 finally completed the planned route from Selma to Montgomery.
The federal government response was spearheaded by President Lyndon Johnson, who promised to send a voters’ rights bill to Congress that week. That bill was a bit delayed, but on Monday, 15 March, the President addressed a joint session of Congress in a televised address to call for the immediate adoption of the proffered Voting Rights Act. Taking as his theme the protest anthem “We Shall Overcome”, Johnson unequivocally declared the ongoing violation of African Americans’ suffrage rights as “an issue [that lays] bear the secret heart of America itself… the values and the purposes and the meaning of our beloved Nation.” To deny black citizens the vote, he said, “is not only to do injustice, it is to deny America and to dishonor the dead who gave their lives for American freedom.”
To deny black citizens the vote, he said, “is not only to do injustice, it is to deny America and to dishonor the dead who gave their lives for American freedom.”
While the President may have hoped for a quick passage of the Act, politicking and entrenched resistance delayed its final vote until the first week of August. The House passed the Act on 03 August 328-74, and the next day the Senate voted 79-18 to adopt the Act.
The signing ceremony occurred in the Capitol building two days later, on 06 August. President Johnson, surrounded by Civil Rights activists, signed the Voting Rights Bill in the President’s Room. Afterwards, commemorative pens were handed out to various dignitaries, including the recovering John Lewis.
The Voting Rights Act banned literacy and English tests, or any “voting qualification or prerequisite to voting… on account of race or color”, and authorized the US Attorney General to challenge poll taxes’ constitutionality in court. The Attorney General was further authorized to investigate and intervene in districts that took actions that were intended to or resulted in disenfranchisement of a racial minority. It also assigned federal employees to observe regional elections to ensure that neither force, nor coercion, nor fear prevented minority citizens from seeking the ballot box.
The effects of the Act were momentous: by the end of 1965, more than a quarter of a million African American citizens were newly registered to vote, and by 1967 half were registered, and African Americans became the registered majority in nine Southern states. Over the next fifteen years (1965-1980), the number of African Americans elected to office nearly quadrupled.
The Voting Rights Act by no means marked the “end” of discrimination or the fight against it, but it was a significant victory nonetheless. The Act remained the law of the land without alteration until 2013, when the Supreme Court sunset the “coverage formula” used to determine localities in which certain special provisions applied, and portions of it remain in effect to today.
Cover Image: President Lyndon B. Johnson meets with Martin Luther King, Jr., at the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (Yoichi Okamoto, photographer)
Center Image: Participants, some carrying American flags, marched from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in the 1965 Civil Rights March (Peter Pettus, author)
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