Six Key Moments on the Road to the Voting Rights Act of 1965

When 1965 began, federal voting rights legislation was far from the minds of most in Washington.

After all, Congress had just finished a bruising battle the year before to pass the Civil Rights Act. That bill had been a heavy lift, requiring supporters to overcome a 54-day filibuster by Southern senators that had all but ground other business in the Senate to a halt.

In the new year, it would be enough of a challenge for President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration to oversee the implementation of a law that, among other things, barred discrimination in public accommodations and racial discrimination in schools. Indeed, compliance in the South was already proving predictably uneven and slow going.

President Johnson was also eager to move forward on other priorities on his Great Society agenda, including watershed legislation to create the Medicare and Medicaid system and reform the nation’s outdated and racist immigration laws. Based on lawmakers’ experience passing much more limited voting rights legislation in 1957 and 1960, taking on new voting rights legislation promised an all-consuming fight that could easily derail these and other high priority bills.

But sometimes history has a way of overtaking plans.

By the end of summer, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 would be signed into law, requiring states to honor the 15th Amendment’s guarantee that the right to vote not be denied because of race.

These are six key moments in the story of how, against all odds, a law that transformed American democracy came to be.

The road to the Voting Rights Act begins in the Black Belt of Alabama, an agricultural and historically fraught region stretching across the south-central part of the state. (The region derives its name from the dark, rich soils that made it the heart of Alabama’s cotton and cash crop economy.)

In 1962, young organizers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had come to the Black Belt to begin a voter registration campaign centered in Selma, the county seat of Dallas County, Alabama. But the campaign struggled to make much progress after running into determined opposition from the region’s white community along with fear and skepticism from would-be Black voters.

Indeed, even by the standards of Alabama in the mid-1960s, Black registration rates in the Black Belt remained stubbornly low. Statewide, around one in five eligible Black Alabamians were registered to vote by the start of 1965, but in Dallas County, just 5 percent were. County officials simply found one excuse after another to not register eligible Black voters. It didn’t help that registration offices were only open two days a month. Nearby Lowndes County was even worse. In January 1965, it did not have a single Black voter on its rolls, even though the county was around 80 percent Black.

But as the new year dawned, Martin Luther King Jr. and area activists decided to make a renewed push and found new momentum.

Only a few Black voters managed to navigate all the necessary hoops to be added to the rolls, but scores of eligible citizens had begun regularly lining up at county offices to try to register — joined, in many places, by a growing number of young demonstrators of elementary and high school age.

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Horace Cort/AP

White officials reacted forcefully, arresting would-be registrants and demonstrators by the hundreds for marching without a permit or failing to comply with various arbitrary rules. But, in a remarkable moment of courage, many of the arrested simply returned to the lines after their release from jail.

The registration efforts and the violent responses they drew attracted national attention, and volunteers, including white college students and clergy, began to pour into Selma and surrounding communities from other parts of the country to help.

One Black Belt community where renewed voter registration efforts took place was Marion, the seat of heavily rural Perry County, Alabama. It was there in early February that state troopers arrested James Orange, an organizer from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). They charged him with contributing to the delinquency of minors for enlisting high school students to help with voter registration work.

Fearful that Orange might be lynched, Black residents held a march at the county courthouse on the night of February 18, 1965. Local law enforcement officials and state troopers responded violently, beating marchers indiscriminately. When Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old army veteran, tried to take shelter in a nearby café along with his mother, a state trooper shot him twice in the stomach. His death eight days later would serve as the catalyst for the history-making march from Selma to Montgomery.

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Courtesy of the National Civil Rights Museum

The plan for a multiday march on foot to the Alabama State Capitol to honor Jackson was controversial, not least because marchers would need to travel through parts of the region most prone to brutality from both officials and bystanders. Some organizers pulled out for fear of violence. But John Lewis, King, and organizers from the SCLC decided to press ahead in hopes of drawing national attention to the need for federal voting rights legislation.

Few events in American civil rights history are as iconic or pivotal as organizers’ aborted start to the march from Selma to Montgomery on March 7, 1965 — a day that would be remembered as Bloody Sunday.

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Associated Press

At 1:40 p.m. that day, some 600 marchers led by Lewis and the SCLC’s Hosea Williams set off from Brown Chapel after receiving training in nonviolence principles. The group organized in a Selma playground into pairs of two to comply with the city’s strict parade restrictions and then headed down the city’s main street toward the Alabama River and the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

At the top of the curved suspension bridge, the marchers looked down toward the east bank of the river and saw around 150 heavily armed Alabama state troopers waiting for them on the other side. Glancing back at Selma on the river’s west bank, they saw a large, menacing, club-wielding posse led by Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark. Boxed in with no good choices, they decided to proceed.

As marchers reached the river’s east bank, Major John Cloud of the Alabama state police announced through a loudspeaker that the march was illegal and ordered the marchers to disperse. When Williams asked to speak to Cloud, he replied, “There is no word to be had.”

Lewis suggested that marchers kneel and pray, but before they could, troopers, some on horseback, set upon them. As Roy Reed reported in The New York Times, “The first 10 or 20 Negros were swept to the ground screaming, arms and legs flying. . . . Those still on their feet retreated. The troopers continued pushing, using both the force of their bodies and the prodding of their nightsticks. A cheer went up from white spectators lining the south side of the highway. The mounted possemen spurred their horses and rode at a run into the retreating mass.”

Knocked unconscious by a trooper’s blows, Lewis was among dozens — young and old, men and women — who suffered grave injuries that day. Hospital x-rays revealed he had suffered a fractured skull.

ABC News reporters on the ground in Selma rushed footage of troopers’ shocking onslaught past local police roadblocks and onto commercial flights bound first for Atlanta and then New York City. When ABC executives viewed the newly developed film that evening, they made the decision to interrupt the network’s high-viewership television debut of Trial at Nuremberg to air footage of the day’s brutal events in Selma, almost in its entirety, to an aghast national audience. The other two TV networks soon followed suit.

In the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, the pressure on Johnson to respond was intense and immediate. 

On March 9, 1965, he issued a statement saying that experts were drafting new federal legislation to protect voting rights, and on March 15, he delivered what has become known as his “We Shall Overcome” speech to a joint session of Congress.

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Associated Press

The decision to give the speech was an impromptu one, and speechwriter Richard Goodwin had only about eight hours to complete a draft. In fact, the final version of the speech was finished so close to the 9 p.m. address time that Johnson delivered it using a typewritten copy rather than a teleprompter. Despite being pulled together quickly, it would go down in history as one of Johnson’s most memorable and consequential speeches.

The president began his 49-minute speech by telling Congress and the national audience that while many civil rights issues were “very complex,” ensuring the right to vote wasn’t. Voting was basic, he explained: “Every American citizen must have an equal right to vote. There is no reason which can excuse the denial of that right.”

Nor, he went on, was the struggle for voting rights in the South simply an issue for Black Americans, telling the gathered members of Congress: “There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem. And we are met here tonight as Americans — not as Democrats or Republicans — we are met here as Americans to solve that problem.”

Johnson asked members to join him “in working long hours — nights and weekends, if necessary —  to pass this bill,” and he explained the urgency of the moment by invoking Lincoln, saying, “It was more than a hundred years ago that Abraham Lincoln, a great president of another party, signed the Emancipation Proclamation, but emancipation is a proclamation and not a fact. A century has passed, more than a hundred years, since equality was promised. And yet the Negro is not equal. . . . Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”

After outlining what his proposed voting rights legislation would do, Johnson closed with one of his most memorable rhetorical turns. Recounting his time as a young teacher at a segregated Mexican American school in South Texas in the 1920s, he said he had never imagined that he would hold the power to do something about the endemic racial prejudice affecting his students and their families. But, he said, “Now I do have that chance, and I’ll let you in on a secret: I mean to use it.”

Meanwhile, back in Selma, efforts continued to resume the march to Montgomery.

On March 9, 1965, two days after Bloody Sunday, Martin Luther King Jr. received word that U.S. District Judge Frank Johnson had suspended the march until further notice as he considered a request by King and organizers to block state and local officials from interfering with the plans. In response, a disappointed King led some 2,000 marchers to the Edmund Pettus Bridge to pray.

After eight anxious days, the judge’s ruling came down: The march could go forward according to the detailed plan submitted to the court by organizers.

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Bettmann/Getty

The ruling began with a description of the extreme treatment that would-be voters had received at the hands of state and local officials. Judge Johnson wrote that none of those actions had “been directed toward enforcing any valid law of the State of Alabama” but had the sole purpose “of preventing and discouraging Negro citizens from exercising their rights of citizenship.”

If a march on foot from Selma to Montgomery was a dramatic response, he explained, it was nonetheless an appropriate and constitutional one: “The law is clear that the right to petition one’s government for the redress of grievances may be exercised in large groups. Indeed, where, as here, minorities have been harassed, coerced and intimidated, group association may be the only way of exercising such rights.”

To ensure that marchers could exercise their constitutional right to march, not only did Judge Johnson block officials from interfering with the march, but he also ordered them to provide the march with police protection.

Six days later, after a flurry of appeals by Alabama officials, the march kicked off on March 21 under the protection of the Alabama National Guard (albeit under federal control, as Alabama Gov. George Wallace had claimed that the state lacked adequate funds to protect marchers). It would reach Montgomery triumphantly four days later.

Alas, while the march itself was mostly peaceful, violence from opponents of voting rights marred both ends of it. As participants waited for permission for the march to begin, Rev. James Reeb, a white Unitarian minister who had come from Boston to join the march, died from injuries suffered from being beaten by a mob in the streets of Selma. And after the march, Viola Liuzzo, a white Detroit woman, was shot and killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan while shuttling marchers by car back and forth between Selma and Montgomery.

Although President Johnson expressed hopes on the night of his March 15 speech that voting rights legislation could be pass in a matter of weeks, drafting a comprehensive bill that would withstand judicial scrutiny and win the votes necessary to overcome a filibuster took time.

Much of the credit for getting the bill through Congress goes to the bipartisan duo of Democratic Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana and Republican Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois.

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Henry Griffin/AP

Once voting rights legislation was on the agenda, the two leaders met regularly with the White House and Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to debate and flesh out the bill’s details. Dirksen, in particular, played a key role in helping to develop what would become the law’s signature requirement that jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination get approval from the federal government before making any changes to voting policies.

Bipartisan support for the Voting Rights Act would endure for more than five decades. In subsequent years, Congress reauthorized or amended the law five times. Each time, the bills passed by overwhelming bipartisan margins. In the most recent reauthorization in 2006, the bill passed the House 393–33 and the Senate 98–0 before being signed into law by President George W. Bush — a powerful reminder that it was not so long ago that protecting the right to vote wasn’t a polarizing issue. It was instead, as President Johnson said on the night of March 15, 1965, “an American problem.”