--- title: The Voting Rights Act of 1965 at 50: LBJ, MLK and How It Came to Be description: This landmark legislation was signed on Aug. 6, 1965. Here's how we got there canonical: https://time.com/3985603/voting-rights-act-1965-history/ author: Maya Rhodan article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-08-06T13:30:17.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:58:16.877Z article:section: History og:title: The Voting Rights Act of 1965 at 50: LBJ, MLK and How It Came to Be og:description: This landmark legislation was signed on Aug. 6, 1965. Here's how we got there og:url: https://time.com/3985603/voting-rights-act-1965-history/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt48c59b828cdc4e27/69885df6f887dc1fa3e91b95/voting-rights.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: LBJ hands pen to MLK og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The Voting Rights Act of 1965 at 50: LBJ, MLK and How It Came to Be twitter:description: This landmark legislation was signed on Aug. 6, 1965. Here's how we got there twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt48c59b828cdc4e27/69885df6f887dc1fa3e91b95/voting-rights.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # The Voting Rights Act at 50: How the Law Came to Be > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: The March on Washington: The Movement Begins [Watch (HLS stream): The March on Washington: The Movement Begins](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/eYWENlb4.m3u8) (6:26)  _Published 2014-04-07. The March on Washington was a peaceful demonstration for racial equality. But it would not have happened without the beatings, arrests and violent struggle for civil rights that had already engulfed the Deep South._ by [Maya Rhodan](https://time.com/author/maya-rhodan/) ## Maya Rhodan Aug 6, 2015 1:30 PM UTC  U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson hands a pen to civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the the signing of the voting rights act as officials look on behind them, Washington, D.C., Aug. 6, 1965. U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson hands a pen to civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the the signing of the voting rights act as officials look on behind them, Washington, D.C., Aug. 6, 1965. Washington Bureau / Getty Images by [Maya Rhodan](https://time.com/author/maya-rhodan/) ## Maya Rhodan Aug 6, 2015 1:30 PM UTC When President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law, exactly 50 years ago on Thursday, he noted that the day was “a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield.” On Aug. 6, 1965, Johnson closed one chapter of America’s history of denying black Americans the right to vote. For nearly a century, the words of the 15th Amendment, which guarantees the right to vote regardless of “race, color, or previous conditional of servitude” had been rendered useless by subversive tactics like secret ballots, poll taxes, literacy tests and other discriminatory practices that essentially made it impossible for most blacks to cast a ballot. “It was like a stirring march that was written but never played,” TIME wrote of the 15th Amendment in 1965\. Between 1890 and 1908, seven southern states had constitutional amendments that established poll taxes and grandfather clauses—which gave leeway to poor whites looking to vote, as long as their ancestors had voted before 1867—and stripped African Americans of their voting rights. In 2013, Slate [published](http://www.slate.com/blogs/the%5Fvault/2013/06/28/voting%5Frights%5Fand%5Fthe%5Fsupreme%5Fcourt%5Fthe%5Fimpossible%5Fliteracy%5Ftest%5Flouisiana.html) what appeared to be an original copy of the type of literacy test that was administered in Louisiana during the long period before the passage of the Voting Rights Act. The test featured confusing prompts like “draw a line around the number or letter of this sentence” and “draw a line around the shortest word in this line.” According to research by the National Park Service, in Mississippi literacy tests asked questions like “how many bubbles are in a bar of soap?” When these sneaky laws were in place, black voter registration and participation plummeted throughout the south. According to the Constitutional Rights Foundation, in Mississippi alone the percentage of black voting-age men who were registered to vote fell from 90% during the Reconstruction period after the 15th Amendment’s passage to about 6% in 1892\. By 1940, only about 3% of eligible blacks in the south were registered to vote. And with the law on their side, segregationists in the South began to use more overt, and at times violent, tactics to keep blacks from voting. Without the vote, African Americans had very little say in how their communities functioned. Their disenfranchisement sparked a movement across the country that demanded equal protection under the law and the right to vote. “Give us the ballot, and we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights,” Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said during a speech in 1957, in the early days of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1964, the Congress on Racial Equality and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee led volunteers across Mississippi to register blacks to vote, during what was known as the Freedom Summer. The [deaths of three volunteers](http://time.com/3602201/presidential-medal-freedom-summer/)—two white and one black—pushed Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964\. The efforts in Alabama came to a head during the Selma marches in early 1965\. Activists who had planned a march from Selma to Montgomery Alabama were met with Billy clubs and an angry mob led by state troopers as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965, which would later be known as “[Bloody Sunday.](http://time.com/3720555/selma-bloody-sunday/)” The startling image of the angry mob ravaging peaceful protesters reverberated across the nation, from the citizens who traveled to Alabama to stand in solidarity with protestors to President Johnson, who introduced the Voting Rights Act to Congress shortly after. “It is not just Negroes,” Johnson told Congress, “but it’s really all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.” But, though Johnson’s actions may have seemed like a speedy turnaround after Selma, as TIME noted in [1965](http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,841744-3,00.html), the fight for the bill had been a long one already: --- > “” --- The hearings leading up to the vote on the bill made clear that the federal government’s prior efforts to block discriminatory laws and protect the right to vote had not been enough. (For example, when Congress granted federal access to voter registration records, Mississippi responded with a law that gave registrars the right to burn those very papers.) Under the new law, the federal government would have power to intervene directly if and when a state passed a law that would block certain citizens from voting. In essence, the bill picked up where the 15th Amendment left off. And weeks later, blacks wasted little time registering and getting out to vote, as TIME observed later that month: --- > “” --- **_Read more about the Voting Rights Act, from 1965, here in the TIME Vault:_** [Trigger of Hope](http://time.com/vault/issue/1965-08-20/page/23/) **_Read more about what happened after the law was passed:_**[_The Voting Rights Act at 50: How It Changed the World_](http://ti.me/1IplMAY) ## Transcript [ MUSIC ] Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, there's not anything more powerful than the marching feet of a determined people. We shall not be moved. As a kid, there was not much I could aspire to. We were diminished in the way we thought we could access power. And be part of the American fabric. [ NOISE ] And so, this gigantic march. We were saying to the world, this Land of great opportunity. This land of liberty, has an asterisk beside it. It is a land of freedom for everybody else, except black people. [ CROSSTALK ] Do you want to be free? Yes! Do you want to be free? Yes! Do you want to be free? Yes! [ CROSSTALK ] [ MUSIC ] Prior to Martin Luther King, Jr ., the United States was like a dysfunctional drug addict or alcoholic. You become addicted to racial segregation. [ MUSIC ] The end of the second World War, you were under the belief, if we were triumphant over Fascism, that the men and women returned from that conflict. Would be celebrated and honored When I was growing up in rural Alabama and would see those signs that was there. White waiting, colored waiting. White men, colored men. I would ask my mother, my father, my grandparents why they would say, that's the way it is, don't get in the way. I first knew of Dr. King the way everybody knew of Dr. King. All of a sudden one day in the midst of this turmoil in some far away place called Montgomery. Dr. King was pressed into service and took over the leadership of the Montgomery bus boycott, and we heard that almost immediately because not only did he, accept the leadership. But he pressed this idea that we should do it nonviolently. I was deeply inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King Junior to find a way to get in the way. So, I used non violence by sitting on a lunch counter stool, by going on the freedom ride. To get in the way. The Freedom Ride was an attempt to break the segregation laws on interstate transportation on buses and on trains. There were six whites on the Freedom Ride and seven blacks we would sit together the black and white and Rock Hill South Carolina is where we encountered the first violence with John Lewis being. Pretty well beaten up. Federal government finally intervened and these early victories only encouraged us that we could do other things. They were very smart, media wise, because they dressed up. They put the ties on, they put jackets on. They were looking good. And they are going up against the authority. They're going against the man That was tremendously exciting to us as young, white southerners. As the non- violent uh, concept grew, parallel to that was also the growth of, eye for an eye violence. And there were many who, were quite bright, and quite gifted and honorable men and women. We saw violence as an answer. That just did not quite sit comfortably with the code that others of us had. Saying that although racism was a cruel experience, we could not fight it by becoming racists. [ NOISE ] In Birmingham, Alabama, the nation was cheated with television images. Of black and white boys and girls having high pressure fire hoses , slam them up against the walls as they were peacefully demonstrating to end segregation. Police dogs biting them. These pictures were circulated all around the world. [ NOISE ] But those demonstrations were like a. Spark that ignited a prairie fire of black protests across the country. And Kennedy, on the one hand he's trying to win Africans and people and say, we're a better system than Communism, and at the same time there was this harsh treatment of black people that just didn't square in the final equation. And the more we were fiesty in our demands of government, the more it revealed the weaknesses in our construct. What started out, as the Black Negro protest, had developed into a Negro revolution. There was a feeling that we would not be able to break the deep south. So, that march on Washington was to be the culmination of all of this intense organizing. It really has to be a moral crusade for the country. The struggle for freedom in the United States had to move to the center of power. To where the predsident and the congress were that no matter how many demonstrations took place In Montgomery and in Birmingham, and in places all around the South. That until you could change the central government, significant things wouldn't happen. The march on Washington was an accumulation of all this cuz here would have been the biggest display of America in its most democratic moment. Making a choice, and it was something that was emerging as, a great demonstration as to the will of the people. [ MUSIC ] [ UNKNOWN ] That that day, erupted, into violence. Then our cause would be seriously. [ UNKNOWN ] reversed. And hard to come by again. 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