6 Aug 1965 Jahr - Voting rights act passed by congress

Beschreibung:

Voting Rights Act of 1965:
Law passed during Lyndon Johnson’s administration that outlawed measures designed to exclude African Americans, and other people of color, from voting.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was signed by LBJ on August 6, outlawed the literacy tests and other devices that prevented African Americans and other people of color from registering to vote, and authorized the attorney general to send federal examiners to register voters in any county where registration was less than 50 percent. Together with the Twenty-Fourth Amendment (ratified in 1964), which outlawed the poll tax in federal elections, the Voting Rights Act fulfilled a promise that had been denied for a century.

Education, which declared public school segregation unconstitutional. As indicated on this map, the struggle then quickly spread, raising other issues and seeding new organizations. Other organizations quickly joined the battle and shifted the focus away from the courts to mass action and organization. The year 1965 marked the high point, when violence against the Selma, Alabama, marchers spurred the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

The resulting shift in representation was profound. In 1960, only 20 percent of black people in the country had been registered to vote; by 1971, registration reached 62 percent (Map 26.4). Across the nation the number of black elected officials began to climb, almost quadrupling from 1,400 to 4,900 between 1970 and 1980 and doubling again by the early 1990s. Most of those elected held local offices — from sheriff to county commissioner — something unimaginable just a generation earlier. As Hartman Turnbow, a Mississippi farmer who risked his life to register in 1964, later declared, “It won’t never go back where it was.”

Neither would the liberal New Deal coalition. By the second half of the 1960s, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party had won its battle with the conservative, segregationist wing. Left-leaning Democrats had embraced the civil rights movement and made black equality a cornerstone of a new “rights” liberalism, though not without consequences. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, southern whites and many conservative northern whites responded by switching to the Republican Party. In 1964, former Dixiecrat presidential candidate Strom Thurmond, a senator from South Carolina, led the revolt by joining the Republican Party. The broad but fragile alliance that supported the New Deal consensus — working-class whites, northern African Americans, urban professionals, and white southern segregationists — had begun to fray.


After passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, black registration in the South increased dramatically. The bars on the map show the number of African Americans registered in 1964, before the act was passed, and in 1975, after it had been in effect for ten years. States in the Deep South, such as Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, had the biggest increases.

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