What effect did the Voting Rights Act of 1965 have on the South?

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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