Voting Rights Act of 1965 VRA

The 15th Amendment barred racial discrimination in voting in 1870, but for nearly a century Southern states kept Black citizens from the polls with literacy tests, poll taxes, white primaries, and intimidation. In 1964 only about 7 percent of eligible Black adults in Mississippi were registered. After state troopers attacked marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson asked Congress for a strong voting law, and he signed the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965, after the Senate passed it 77 to 19 and the House 333 to 85.

Section 2 bars any voting practice that denies or abridges the right to vote on account of race, nationwide. Section 4 suspended literacy tests and set a formula identifying jurisdictions with low registration and a history of discriminatory devices, and Section 5 required those jurisdictions to obtain federal approval, called preclearance, before changing any voting rule. Federal examiners registered voters directly, and within a few years Black registration in Mississippi rose to about 60 percent. Congress extended and expanded the law in 1970, 1975, 1982, and 2006, adding protections for language minorities and, in 1982, a results test for Section 2 after the Supreme Court had required proof of intent.

In Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, the Supreme Court struck down the Section 4 coverage formula as outdated, leaving preclearance without effect. Section 2 remained the main tool for challenging discriminatory rules and maps, used in cases such as Thornburg v. Gingles and Allen v. Milligan, but the Court narrowed its reach in Brnovich v. DNC in 2021 and in Louisiana v. Callais in 2026. Supporters of the law credit it with transforming American democracy and argue that Congress should restore preclearance, while critics argue that its race-conscious remedies have outlived the conditions that justified them and conflict with equal protection.