Johnson Signs the Voting Rights Act
Federal examiners and a ban on literacy tests finally give teeth to the Fifteenth Amendment's 95-year-old promise
Quick facts
- Signed by
- President Lyndon B. Johnson
- Date
- August 6, 1965
- Key mechanism
- Federal preclearance for covered jurisdictions
What happened
Less than five months after Bloody Sunday, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law on August 6, 1965. The National Archives holds the signed act, which outlawed literacy tests and other discriminatory devices Southern states had used for decades to keep Black citizens from registering to vote. The law authorized federal examiners to register voters directly and required states and counties with a history of discrimination, mostly across the Deep South, to get federal approval, known as preclearance, before changing their voting laws. Black voter registration in the covered states rose sharply within months of the act's passage.
Why it matters
The Voting Rights Act did for the ballot what the Civil Rights Act had done for public accommodations, giving federal enforcement teeth that a century of piecemeal state-by-state litigation had failed to produce, though the Supreme Court's 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision later struck down the coverage formula that determined which jurisdictions needed preclearance.
How we know
The National Archives preserves the enrolled 1965 act as a milestone document, and government voting registration data from the period documents the immediate jump in Black registration in covered states.
Sources
- National Archives. Voting Rights Act (1965) · Primary source (author-declared)archives.gov · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University. Voting Rights Act of 1965 · Reputable sourcekinginstitute.stanford.edu · The domain "kinginstitute.stanford.edu" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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