Minority Voting Rights

Archive Report

Impact of Voting Tights Act of 1965

Shift of Black Demands from Street to Ballot

The voting rights ACT of 1965, often heralded as the most important civil rights legislation ever enacted, is due to expire this year unless Congress votes to extend it. The debate over extension will be conducted in a political climate far removed from the one in which President Johnson on March 17, 1965, asked Congress to guarantee the franchise to blacks and other minority men and women who were being denied that most fundamental of American rights—the right to vote. Civil rights marchers had been attacked only a few days earlier as they carried their protests against Negro disenfranchisement from Selma to Montgomery. Moreover, the old civil rights movement was beginning ...

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