What was the immediate effect of the passage of the Voting Rights Act?

President Lyndon Johnson supported the Voting Rights Act, but the critical push for the legislation came from the Movement itself. SNCC organizers played a key role in demonstrating–and documenting–the unrelenting, often violent, and officially-sanctioned discrimination that prospective Black voters faced. This gave Justice Department officials, including John Doar, clear examples of discrimination in the voting rights lawsuits they filed against hostile white registrars in the Deep South. Over time, the slow pace and piecemeal nature of these cases helped convince the Justice Department that a more systematic solution was necessary. Doar, speaking at the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Civil Rights division at the Justice Department, asserted that the Selma and voting rights success was built on the preceding but more obscure work of SNCC and the dirt farmers in Greenwood, Mississippi, which first prompted the department’s development of a comprehensive new approach to voting rights protection, that became the template for the department’s interventions in Selma.

This, in conjunction with the demonstrations led by Dr. King in Selma, Alabama, generated public support for voting rights legislation. Scholar Charles Payne warns us that it is easy to focus on major legislation when, in fact, what may be more significant is the groundswell that made it necessary or subsequent action that made it meaningful.

9.) SNCC sought not only Black access to the vote, but also to transform voting into “freedom politics” and small-d democracy for all.

After marching through Lowndes County during the Selma-to-Montgomery march, SNCC organizers returned to the county known as “Bloody Lowndes,” intent on using the Voting Rights Act to improve the daily lives of African Americans in the community. The organizing effort in Lowndes County provides a wonderful case study of SNCC’s approach to using the vote. As they considered their options–including a racist local Democratic Party (which had “white supremacy for the right” as its slogan) and a nationally mixed, but locally non-existent, Republican Party–SNCC’s Courtland Cox asked, “what would it profit a man to have the vote and not be able to control it?” He explained,

The Negroes of Lowndes County want a political grouping that is controlled by them. They want a political grouping that is responsive to the needs of the poor, not necessarily the black people, but those who are illiterate, those who have poor educations, those of low income, that is to say, those who are [considered] unqualified in this society. To do this they had to form a group on the county level that represented their own interests.

Based on this idea, SNCC worked with local residents to form an independent political party, the Lowndes County Freedom Party (LCFP). According to Gloria House, one of SNCC’s field secretaries, “we were helping to equip the people with the information and skills essential to running the county themselves not just as new voters but also as political leaders. We found that a review of African American and African history, giving a strong sense of historical identity, was of immeasurable significance in this process.”

Bob Fitch photography archive, © Stanford University Libraries

On 6 August 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, calling the day “a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield” (Johnson, “Remarks in the Capitol Rotunda”). The law came seven months after Martin Luther King launched a Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) campaign based in Selma, Alabama, with the aim of pressuring Congress to pass such legislation.

“In Selma,” King wrote, “we see a classic pattern of disenfranchisement typical of the Southern Black Belt areas where Negroes are in the majority” (King, “Selma—The Shame and the Promise”). In addition to facing arbitrary literacy tests and poll taxes, African Americans in Selma and other southern towns were intimidated, harassed, and assaulted when they sought to register to vote. Civil rights activists met with fierce resistance to their campaign, which attracted national attention on 7 March 1965, when civil rights workers were brutally attacked by white law enforcement officers on a march from Selma to Montgomery.

Johnson introduced the Voting Rights Act that same month, “with the outrage of Selma still fresh” (Johnson, “Remarks in the Capitol Rotunda”). In just over four months, Congress passed the bill. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 abolished literacy tests and poll taxes designed to disenfranchise African American voters and gave the federal government the authority to take over voter registration in counties with a pattern of persistent discrimination. “This law covers many pages,” Johnson said before signing the bill, “but the heart of the act is plain. Wherever, by clear and objective standards, States and counties are using regulations, or laws, or tests to deny the right to vote, then they will be struck down” (Johnson, “Remarks in the Capitol Rotunda”).

On the same day Johnson signed the bill, he announced that his attorney general, Nicholas Katzenbach, would initiate lawsuits against four states that still required a poll tax to register. Although King called the law “a great step forward in removing all of the remaining obstacles to the right to vote,” he knew that the ballot would only be an effective tool for social change if potential voters rid themselves of the fear associated with voting (King, 5 August 1965). To meet this goal and “rid the American body politic of racism,” SCLC developed its Political Education and Voter Registration Department (King, “Annual Report”). 

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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.

[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.

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.

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.

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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