March Feature: Voting Rights Act of 1965
Despite the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, African Americans in the South faced tremendous obstacles to voting. As a result, very few African Americans were registered voters, and they had very little, if any, political power, either locally or nationally.
By the 1950s the civil rights movement galvanized the nation. Congress passed Civil Rights Acts in 1957, 1960, and 1964, but none of these laws were strong enough to prevent voting discrimination by local officials. The question before Congress was whether the federal government should guarantee the right to vote by assuming the power to register voters.
Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which aimed to increase the number of people registered to vote in areas where there was a record of previous discrimination. The legislation shifted the power to register voters from state and local officials to the federal government.
