Last month, the U.S. celebrated the 60th anniversary of President Lyndon B. Johnson signing the landmark Voting Rights Act (VRA) into law. The legislation promised “to enforce the 15th amendment” and banned any attempt to “deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” Long hailed as one of the most important victories of the civil rights movement, and American democracy itself, this achievement is in jeopardy, as Republicans levy attacks and work to dismantle the VRA through the courts.
Yet, the decades-long effort to secure passage of the VRA offers pragmatic wisdom for safeguarding—and even extending—the gains enshrined by the law. While the VRA was undoubtedly a singular achievement, it represented the culmination of a long struggle for Black Americans, one shaped by victories, setbacks, and, most importantly, persistence.
Beginning with the country’s founding, Black Americans pushed for the franchise, citing the language of universal rights, freedom, and citizenship in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. While some Black Americans had access to the ballot in the antebellum period, most, who were enslaved, did not.
Calls for full voting rights increased after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. As Frederick Douglass contended, the vote was the “keystone to the arch of human liberty.” The passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, which enfranchised formerly enslaved men, seemingly brought the push for voting rights to fruition.
But this victory proved chimerical. By the late 19th century, white Southerners had regained control of state governments from the biracial coalitions that emerged following the ratification of the 15th Amendment. With the help of the courts, these governments disfranchised Black voters, establishing poll taxes, literacy tests, understanding clauses, and other measures to effectively deny them the vote. In Alabama, for instance, over 180,000 Black men were registered to vote in 1900. Just two years later, following the ratification of a new Alabama Constitution, that number plummeted to less than 3,000. By 1944, less than 5% of the Black population voted in Southern states.
Yet, activists and civil rights lawyers, like Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, remained undeterred. They pressed the courts for justice—and, slowly, they made significant strides. In the case of Smith v. Allwright in 1944, the Supreme Court ruled all-white primaries antithetical to a “constitutional democracy,” chipping away at the rules that kept Black Southerners from voting.
As the courts were beginning to erode these limitations, Black Americans were also pushing for broad civil rights. The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, brought by families in Topeka, Kans., again with the help of Marshall as well as Constance Baker Motley, declared segregation in public education unconstitutional. The next year, Black residents of Montgomery, Ala., boycotted the bus system, deploying similar tactics to ones that had worked in Baton Rouge, La., two years earlier.
This effort revealed a people determined to resist segregation and abuse in public transportation. They were soon joined by young student activists sitting in, kneeling in, wading in, “seek[ing] a social order of justice permeated by love.” Voting was a crucial part of that envisioned social order.
In the early 1960s, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and other organizations worked to educate and register eligible voters, especially in rural communities throughout the Deep South. This was a deliberate decision and one encouraged by then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who told civil rights leaders in 1962 that ensuring voting rights “would be more helpful than anything else.”
For the next several years, activists knocked on the doors of sharecroppers and drove folks to county registrars’ offices, often facing denials or delays, arrests, and violence. SNCC conducted “Freedom Days” where local Black men and women asserted their rights, chanting “One Man-One Vote” in places like Hattiesburg, Miss., and, presciently, Selma, Ala.
In 1964, the decades of activism led to the landmark Civil Rights Act. The law included a voting provision, but it did not eliminate the “qualifications” that Southern states used to bar Black voters.
In 1965, civil rights organizations came together in Selma for a large voter registration drive, betting it would provoke a violent response from notorious local authorities that would compel President Johnson and Congress to act. In February, state troopers violently broke up a march for suffrage, resulting in the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a church deacon protecting his family.
Jackson’s death prompted organizers to plan a massive march from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery. Hundreds gathered for the 54-mile march on March 7, 1965. They made it as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma before they confronted mounted state troopers and local law enforcement, wielding billy clubs and tear gas. Television cameras captured the ensuing violence, horrifying much of the nation.
The coverage of what became known as “Bloody Sunday” interrupted ABC’s airing of Judgment at Nuremberg, a film about the atrocities of the Holocaust, leading many, including acclaimed performer and activist Sammy Davis Jr., to observe that the experiences of Black Americans were “probably like the Jews in [Nazi] Germany.”
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The violence and activists’ insistence that they would continue the march forced Johnson into action. He demanded new legislation that would protect the right to vote. “The command of the Constitution is plain,” the president told the nation, “Open your polling places to all your people. Allow men and women to register and vote whatever the color of their skin. Extend the rights of citizenship to every citizen of this land.” Acknowledging the role of the Civil Rights Movement in achieving this bill, Johnson closed his speech with its slogan: “We shall overcome.”
The bill passed 333-85 in the House and 77-19 in the Senate, signaling not only a political achievement but a truly changing country. The Voting Rights Act banned discrimination in voting, and perhaps most significantly, established federal oversight of places that had historically barred Black voters. Those states and counties could not pass new voter legislation without “preclearance” from the federal government. One southern congressman considered it to be “one of the most monumental laws in the entire history of American freedom.”
For a long moment, it was. In the months following, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights reported that states “moved at a rapid pace” to comply. Between 1964 and 1969, the percentage of Black Mississippians registered to vote increased from 6.7% to 66.5%, in Alabama the number jumped from 23% to 56.7%. By decade’s end, the total number of registered Black voters had nearly doubled.
Congress regularly renewed and amended the Voting Rights Act for more than four decades, with broad bipartisan support. Legislators resisted attempts to weaken the seminal legislation. Republican Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush, as well as Democratic President Bill Clinton, all signed extensions of the VRA. Though some opposition and animosity endured, it was often ignored as a vestige of the past rather than a current challenge.
But then in 2013, in Shelby v. Holder, a five-four conservative majority on the Supreme Court dealt a major blow to the protections provided by the VRA. The justices ruled that Section 4(b), which required federal oversight for states that had historically discriminated against Black voters, was unconstitutional, placing an undue burden on the states and constituting “disparate treatment.” Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts explained that “our country has changed.” He cited the fact that “African-American voter turnout has come to exceed white voter turnout in five of the six States originally covered.”
The decision freed the states previously limited by preclearance to weaken voting protections, add requirements conditioning the right to vote, and close polling places. Though these efforts were not always successful, they targeted Black voters with “almost surgical precision,” as a federal appeals court in North Carolina put it.
Subsequent Supreme Court decisions have further weakened the VRA, and in October, the Court will hear Louisiana v. Callais, which could potently undermine another provision.
Yet, the lesson of the Voting Rights Act is that the response to these setbacks isn’t despair or acquiescence. It took more than a half century of incremental legal gains, community meetings, and voter registration drives to get the VRA passed.
Black Americans understood that the struggle for freedom could be long and undulating. They witnessed the possibilities presented by the 15th Amendment, only to have them stolen away by white Southerners over decades. They were committed to winning back the franchise no matter how long it took.
In our own moment of slipping voter protections, 60 years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, we must remember its history and the men and women who fought for it against all odds.
Ansley Quiros is an associate professor of history at the University of North Alabama and author of God With Us: Lived Theology and the Freedom Struggle in Americus, 1942-1976. She is currently writing a biography of Charles and Shirley Sherrod. Allie R. Lopez is a postdoctoral fellow at Baylor University, working on a book on the freedom struggle in rural Alabama.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
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