The 15th Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified in 1870. It declared that the right to vote could not be denied on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. For the next ninety-five years, across the former Confederate states and in many parts of the North, that right was systematically denied through a comprehensive apparatus of legal obstruction — poll taxes, literacy tests administered selectively and arbitrarily, grandfather clauses, white primaries, registration offices that were open one day a month in a remote location, and violence against anyone who persisted. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was not a new right. It was the federal government finally enforcing a constitutional guarantee that had existed for nearly a century and had been deliberately nullified for nearly a century. The gap between 1870 and 1965 is a measure of what American democracy was willing to tolerate.
The direct path to the Voting Rights Act ran through Selma, Alabama. In early 1965, the Dallas County Voters League and the SCLC organized a voting rights campaign in Selma — a city where Black residents constituted the majority of the population but only 2 percent of registered voters. The registration process in Dallas County was designed to fail: the registrar’s office was open two days a month, applicants had to answer impossible constitutional questions to the satisfaction of a white registrar who had absolute discretion to deny registration, and anyone who attempted to register faced economic retaliation, eviction, and violence. On March 7, 1965 — Bloody Sunday — 600 marchers led by John Lewis and Hosea Williams attempted to walk from Selma to Montgomery to demand voting rights. At the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they were met by state troopers and a sheriff’s posse who attacked them with clubs and tear gas on live television. John Lewis’s skull was fractured. The images broadcast that evening forced a national reckoning.
President Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress on March 15, 1965 — eight days after Bloody Sunday — and closed his speech with the words of the movement: “We shall overcome.” The Voting Rights Act was signed into law on August 6, 1965. It prohibited literacy tests and other discriminatory voting qualifications. It required federal approval — preclearance — for any changes to voting laws in states and counties with documented histories of discrimination. It authorized federal registrars to register voters directly when local officials refused. Within months of its passage, Black voter registration in the Deep South increased dramatically. In Dallas County, Alabama, where two percent of eligible Black voters had been registered before Selma, the number rose to over fifty percent within a year. The act worked because it was specific, it had enforcement mechanisms, and it targeted the exact methods that had been used to nullify the 15th Amendment.
The Voting Rights Act was not permanent. In 2013, the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder struck down the preclearance formula that had required states with documented histories of discrimination to obtain federal approval before changing voting laws. The majority opinion held that the formula was based on outdated data and that the conditions that had justified it no longer existed. Within hours of the decision, several states began implementing voting restrictions that had previously been blocked under preclearance. North Carolina passed a sweeping voter ID law in 2013 that a federal court later found had targeted Black voters with “surgical precision” — eliminating early voting on Sundays, which Black churches had used to organize souls to the polls campaigns, reducing early voting days, and eliminating same-day registration and out-of-precinct voting. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the law in 2016. The legal battle over voting rights in North Carolina continued.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was the direct legal descendant of the 15th Amendment of 1870, the Reconstruction-era constitutional provisions that the Wilmington Massacre of 1898 helped nullify in North Carolina, and the organizing work of generations of Black Americans who refused to accept disenfranchisement as permanent. It was also the target of a sustained campaign of legal and legislative erosion that began almost immediately after its passage and has continued to the present day. The right to vote is not settled in the United States. It has never been settled. Every generation of Black Americans has had to fight for what the Constitution promised their great-grandparents — and every generation has found that the promise requires defending against those who prefer the gap between 1870 and 1965 to the law as written.