The Voting Rights Act
A century after emancipation, the vote acquires content
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Selma, Alabama, was in 1965 a town where over half the residents were Black and under two per cent of them were registered to vote. The effect was immediate and measurable: in Mississippi the share of registered Black voters rose from under seven per cent to over sixty within three years. The act is also a clear example of television changing politics — the images from the Edmund Pettus Bridge made the issue unavoidable. Section 5, requiring pre-clearance of voting changes in covered states, was disabled by the Supreme Court in 2013.
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Black Americans had formally had the vote since 1870, but literacy tests and taxes had made it unusable in the South. After the march from Selma was met with violence on television, Congress passed a law removing the obstacles.
Sources
- Voting Rights Act (1965)
- Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013)
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