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The Voting Rights Act of 1965
The case study in Module Five looks at the passage
The Voting Rights Act of 1965
The case study in Module Five looks at the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and its impact on African-American political participation.
While the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed overt discrimination in public accommodations and government services, it did not directly address the most fundamental denial of African-American rights: the concerted effort to prevent African Americans from exercising their right to vote.
President Lyndon Johnson’s landslide election victory in 1964 emboldened him to seek voting-rights legislation, despite concerns that this would alienate conservative Southern Democrats whose support was needed to pass Johnson’s Great Society social programs. Television coverage of the brutal police response to peaceful voting-rights protesters in the South—most notably, the attack on protesters at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama—galvanized public support for a bill.
Southern opposition in Congress was fierce: opponents waged a 24-day filibuster* in the Senate, and Southerners in the House used every parliamentary tactic they could find to block the legislation. But it eventually passed and was signed into law on August 6, 1965, with both Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks in attendance.
The immediate impact of the Voting Rights Act was a dramatic surge in African-American political participation, with a commensurate increase in the number of African Americans elected to public office. In the longer term, the Voting Rights Act contributed to a historic realignment of the two political parties that has had a profound impact on American politics and society.
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