Voting Rights Act 1965

Legislation embodying sweeping electoral reforms passed by the US Congress and signed into law by US president Lyndon B Johnson on 6 August 1965. The act prohibited literacy tests and poll taxes, which had been used to prevent blacks from voting, and provided for the appointment of federal voting examiners with the authority to register voters in areas not meeting certain existing voter participation requirements. It applied a nationwide prohibition of denial or abridgement of the right to vote on account of race or colour, and made interference with legally conferred voting rights a criminal offence.

The legislation was a direct response to the protests of voting-rights activists, and specifically to the events surrounding the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, led by Martin Luther King, Jr, in March 1965 to dramatize the voting issue. According to the US Bureau of the Census in 1982, the law had an immediate impact: in 1960 there were 22,000 black Americans registered to vote in Mississippi, but by 1966 the number had risen to 175,000; in the same period, Alabama's black American voters went from 66,000 to 250,000 in number, and South Carolina's from 58,000 to 191,000. The Voting Rights Act was readopted and strengthened in 1970, 1975, and 1982. The 1975 amendments provided protection from voting discrimination for all minority-language US citizens.