Voting Rights Act of 1965: LBJ's Toughest Law, Preclearance and Callais

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After his 1964 landslide, Lyndon B. Johnson told Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to write the toughest voting rights act he could, over advisors who feared losing Southern Democrats. The 15th Amendment of 1870 had protected Black voters only briefly before Southern states, from 1888 to 1908, rewrote their constitutions with poll taxes, literacy tests and grandfather clauses. Justice Department suits after 1957 had to prove bias one county at a time while registrars lost records, purged rolls or resigned. In Selma in 1965, Malcolm X's February visit and the beating of marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday shifted the politics, and on March 15 Johnson told Congress, we shall overcome.

Introduced by Mike Mansfield and Everett Dirksen, the act paired a nationwide ban in Section 2 with a Section 4 coverage formula and Section 5 preclearance, which South Carolina v. Katzenbach upheld in 1966. Section 6 federal examiners registered voters directly. In 2013 Shelby County v. Holder struck down the coverage formula, and Brnovich v. DNC in 2021 and Louisiana v. Callais in 2026 narrowed Section 2, which Justice Elena Kagan called the now completed demolition of the act.

Registrars could ask Black applicants how many bubbles were in a bar of soap.
Black voter registration in Mississippi rose from 6.7 percent in 1964 to 66.5 percent in 1969.
Nearly a quarter million new Black voters registered by the end of 1965, a third of them by federal examiners.
A 2020 study found coverage under the act cut political violence in half in those jurisdictions.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg compared ending preclearance to throwing away an umbrella in a rainstorm.

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