Voting Rights Act Signed After Selma Bloody Sunday Defeats Southern Legislative Resistance

President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law, outlawing discriminatory voting practices that have disenfranchised millions of African Americans since Reconstruction. The legislation passes the Senate 77-19 on May 26 and the House 333-85 on July 9, overcoming a 24-day filibuster by Southern senators who characterize the bill as unconstitutional and punitive to the South.

The Act responds to systematic voter suppression infrastructure developed from the 1890s through the 1960s. Southern states deploy interlocking barriers: literacy tests (requiring voters to read and explain state constitution sections, with white clerks determining who passes), poll taxes, residency and property restrictions, grandfather clauses, and extra-legal violence and intimidation. County clerks select complicated technical passages for Black applicants while giving whites simple sentences. In Dallas County, Alabama, only 335 of 15,000 Black citizens of voting age are registered to vote despite intensive registration efforts.

The immediate catalyst is “Bloody Sunday”—March 7, 1965—when 600 civil rights protesters attempting to march from Selma to Montgomery are brutally attacked by state troopers and local police using tear gas, nightsticks, and whips at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. John Lewis suffers a skull fracture. Amelia Boynton is beaten unconscious. The violence, broadcast nationally, galvanizes public support for voting rights legislation.

Eight days after Bloody Sunday, President Johnson addresses a joint session of Congress in what becomes a landmark speech. He identifies the Selma clash as a turning point in U.S. history equivalent to the Battles of Lexington and Concord, declaring “we shall overcome” and calling for immediate action on voting rights.

Despite Democratic control of two-thirds of both congressional chambers, Johnson worries Southern Democrats will kill the bill through filibuster. The “Southern Bloc” of 18 Democratic senators led by Richard Russell (D-GA) and one Republican, John Tower of Texas, mount a 24-day filibuster expressing belief that federal oversight of state elections violates the Constitution. Johnson enlists Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen (R-IL) to gain Republican support, and the coalition of Northern Democrats and Republicans breaks the filibuster.

The Act’s key provisions include: (1) suspension of literacy tests and similar devices in jurisdictions where less than 50% of voting-age residents were registered or voted in 1964; (2) authorization of federal examiners to register voters in covered jurisdictions; (3) requirement that covered jurisdictions obtain federal “preclearance” before changing voting procedures; and (4) prohibition of poll taxes in state and local elections (later upheld in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, 1966).

The law produces immediate and dramatic results. By the end of 1965, a quarter million new Black voters register, one-third by federal examiners. By the end of 1966, only four of 13 Southern states have fewer than 50% of African Americans registered. In Mississippi, Black voter turnout increases from 6% in 1964 to 59% in 1969.

Southern resistance continues through systematic non-compliance, intimidation, and legal challenges. Local officials resign to halt voter registration, claim to have “lost” registration records of racial minorities, and remove registered minorities from electoral rolls. Many federal district court judges oppose racial minority suffrage and provide minimal relief even when the Justice Department prevails in litigation. Between 1957 and 1964, despite 71 voting rights lawsuits, the African American voter registration rate in the South increases only marginally.

The Voting Rights Act represents the apex of Great Society civil rights legislation and the last major civil rights law passed with bipartisan support. Its passage accelerates the political realignment begun with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, driving Southern white voters toward the Republican Party. The preclearance requirement becomes a particular target for conservative legal activists, leading to its effective elimination in Shelby County v. Holder (2013).

The administrative and legal infrastructure developed to suppress Black voting—documentation requirements, purges, discretionary enforcement, claims of fraud prevention—provides templates later adapted for modern voter suppression tactics including strict voter ID laws, aggressive purges of voter rolls, reductions in early voting, and restrictions on voter registration drives.