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The Voting Rights Act
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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