Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act; literacy tests are now outlawed nationwide
In early 1965, Southern registrars still used literacy tests and poll taxes to keep Black citizens off the voter rolls, though the Fifteenth Amendment had guaranteed Black men the vote since 1870. That March, state troopers beat marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, and the images pushed Congress to act. On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, banning literacy tests and putting federal officials in charge of registration in areas with histories of discrimination. Black voter registration surged in the months that followed.
The Act put federal enforcement behind the Fifteenth Amendment for the first time since Reconstruction. It reshaped Black voter registration across the South, and later Supreme Court rulings have since narrowed some of its enforcement provisions.
QWho was Jim Clark, and why did his name end up tied to the law?
Jim Clark was the sheriff of Dallas County, Alabama, where Selma sits, and his aggressive, often violent resistance to Black voter registration drives made him a fixture of national news coverage in early 1965. His deputies' rough handling of registration lines and protests gave television audiences outside the South a direct look at the mechanics of disenfranchisement. Clark's visibility on national television did more than any speech to show viewers what local resistance to Black registration looked like.
QWhat slogan did SNCC organizers use during the Selma voting drive?
James Forman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee described the group's approach as designed to force federal intervention or expose its absence, and the campaign's rallying phrase was "One Man, One Vote." Forman later wrote that the strategy counted on either drawing the government in or proving, through its inaction, that Washington was not on the side of Black voters. Forman said either outcome would put the government's position on the record for Black voters watching Selma.
QDid the Civil Rights Act of 1964 already cover voting discrimination?
Only partly. The 1964 law included some voting rights language, but it did not prohibit most of the actual devices, literacy tests, discriminatory registration procedures, and similar barriers, that Southern registrars used to keep Black citizens off the rolls. That gap is why organizers kept pushing after 1964 and why the Selma campaign focused on registration practices specifically.
