Though Black men had been granted the right to vote with the 15th Amendment in 1870, and Black women with the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, state and local laws, disenfranchisement tactics, and violent intimidation hindered their ability to exercise that right well into the 20th century. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s was instrumental in securing voting equality legislation and an end to some of the most common forms of voter suppression.
Racial Equality: Law vs. Reality
By the mid-20th century, all adult citizens, regardless of race or gender, had been granted the right to vote under federal law. The reality on the ground, however, was quite different, particularly for Black citizens who had faced numerous impediments to voting since the Fifteenth Amendment had enshrined Black men’s right to vote in 1870. Especially prevalent in former Confederate states, impediments included both formal legal measures and informal on-the-ground tactics.
State and local level laws rescinding Black men’s right to vote, including “grandfather clauses” designed to limit voting to only men whose grandfathers could vote prior to 1867, were implemented in many southern states. Poll taxes, a levy on voters that had largely disappeared prior to 1870, were among the most common practices adopted in the 19th century to limit Black voter participation. Literacy tests were another common way to prevent Black men from voting, since, in many states, it had been illegal to teach enslaved people to read.
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Sign up to our Free Weekly NewsletterIn the Reconstruction era, the military was often enlisted to help protect Black voters and ensure they were not physically prevented from voting. As the Reconstruction period came to an end in 1877 and troops withdrew from the former Confederate states, such safeguards disappeared, and outright intimidation was used more and more frequently. One such tactic was the creation of lists of Black registered voters to advise white citizens regarding who should be targeted and “challenged” on election days.
Disenfranchising Black voters also largely kept Black citizens out of office, particularly at the national level. Despite a flurry of Black citizens running for—and winning—office during the immediate post-Civil War era, by the early 20th century, the Black vote had been so sufficiently suppressed that after North Carolina Congressman George Henry White left office in 1901, there were no Black representatives in the House for nearly 30 years and no Black Senators elected until 1967.
The Birth of the Civil Rights Movement
By the mid-20th century, “separate but equal” had reigned for nearly 50 years, with Black and white citizens segregated in many public spaces but supposedly equal under the law. In reality, Jim Crow laws in the South, where the majority of Black citizens resided, ensured that everything from public facilities to legal protections to employment opportunities for Black Americans remained demonstrably inferior to white Americans. Though such laws were not enacted in the North, stark racial disparities and discrimination remained, nonetheless.
World War II marked a turning point that opened political space for Black activism. The demand for labor and soldiers led both government employment and military service to be opened to all Americans, regardless of race. As more Black Americans moved away from the agricultural South into the manufacturing North, where fewer restrictions and limitations impeded their ability to vote, politicians began courting their support, providing some of the necessary political capital to begin actively pushing for equal rights. The shifting social and cultural dynamics of the war and post-war eras also drew increased attention to issues of racial injustice among white Americans.
The push for equal rights coalesced into a recognizable movement in the 1950s, with Black activists staging protests, sit-ins, and boycotts that attracted nationwide attention, won hard-fought victories, and often sparked violent backlash. Slowly, “separate but equal” and the laws that upheld segregation began to fall, perhaps most notably when the Supreme Court struck down school segregation in the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954.
Getting Out the Vote
Characteristically, voting was still marked by dramatic inequality in the mid-20th century. The same tactics that had been used since the post-Civil War days were still in use to suppress Black voters, particularly in the South, where the Ku Klux Klan was responsible for numerous murders of Black citizens who had dared to vote. As of 1940, only 3% of eligible Black voters in the region were actually registered to vote; intimidation and fear were powerful deterrents.
Given this stark disparity, registering Black voters and actively encouraging their participation in elections was one of the key goals of the civil rights movement. Efforts included voter registration drives, organizing transportation to the polls, and literacy classes, in addition to legal challenges, largely brought by the NAACP, to discriminatory voting laws at the state and local levels.
Unsurprisingly, efforts were met with sharp resistance. Registrars simply turned Black voters away or even resigned to prevent anyone from registering. Literacy tests were manipulated to ensure eligible Black voters failed. A rise in redistricting to dilute the power of Black voters was also seen. Voting rights activists were assaulted or lost their jobs. Several activists in Mississippi were murdered. Perhaps most prominently, a peaceful march for voting rights in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, led by future Congressman John Lewis, was met with police violence that was broadcast nationwide and sparked broad outrage.
Despite the collective efforts of civil rights activists and a number of favorable rulings striking down state and local laws that disenfranchised Black voters, progress was marginal, particularly in the South. State and local officials simply refused to cooperate with efforts to enfranchise Black voters. “The Department of Justice’s efforts to eliminate discriminatory election practices by litigation on a case-by-case basis had been unsuccessful in opening up the registration process; as soon as one discriminatory practice or procedure was proven to be unconstitutional and enjoined, a new one would be substituted in its place and litigation would have to commence anew.”
1965: The Voting Rights Act
Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, as well as Congress, had been meeting with civil rights organizations to try to address their concerns since the early 1960s, resulting in legislation like the 24th Amendment, which outlawed poll taxes at the federal level, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which aimed to promote equality and end discrimination for Black citizens in a number of areas, including employment and housing. The particular intractability of the voting rights issue, however, led to the conclusion that legislation specific to voting rights was necessary.
On August 5, 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, outlawing all discriminatory practices designed to disenfranchise citizens on the basis of race: “No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.”
The VRA shifted oversight of voting rights enforcement to the Justice Department and, notably, included special provisions for jurisdictions with a history of discriminatory voting practices. Section 5 required that any change to voting laws be preapproved by the Attorney General or District Court of Washington DC. It also allowed for federal examiners, authorized to register voters, to be dispatched to these jurisdictions and directed the Attorney General to challenge state and local poll taxes in court.
President Johnson signed the Act into law with civil rights activist Rosa Parks at his side, stating: “The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.”
VRA: The First Decade
While some provisions of the Voting Rights Act would take time to be implemented or bear results, other consequences were more immediately apparent. Within days of the Act’s signing, federal examiners were sent to nine jurisdictions, indicating the administration’s intention to enforce its laws. The Act also almost immediately faced challenges to its constitutionality in Southern states but was upheld repeatedly by the Supreme Court.
An increase in Black voter registration was seen within just a few months. By the end of 1965, 250,000 new Black voters had been registered across the country. In Dallas County, Alabama, where civil rights activists had been targeted by state troopers in Selma, the number of registered Black voters leaped from just 2% in 1965 to over 70% in 1968. This trend was seen throughout the Southern states, where the average percentage of eligible Black voters registered hit 62% in 1969, compared with 43% in 1964. Within a decade, the overall disparity between white and Black voter registration rates dropped from 30 percentage points to 8.
The representation of Black citizens in government also began to tick upward over the next decade, with Black mayors elected in some major US cities, the first Black Senator elected since the Reconstruction era, and Shirley Chisholm becoming the first Black woman to serve in Congress, elected in 1968.
Legacy: The VRA in the 21st Century
Once a hallmark of the pursuit of racial justice, the VRA has faced numerous legal challenges and revisions in the decades since its passage. Though it has been reauthorized multiple times in the nearly 60 years since it was first passed, a controversial 2013 Supreme Court decision, Shelby County v. Holder, found Section 4 of the Act, containing the formula by which the federal government determined which jurisdictions were subject to the Act’s remaining special provisions, unconstitutional. This decision effectively gutted the VRA, eliminating the need for any state to seek the approval of the Department of Justice before making changes to voting laws.
Poll taxes and literacy tests are relics of the past, but other discriminatory practices that suppress Black and other minority votes still remain: voter ID laws, gerrymandering, and inadequate voting facilities are just some of the issues that activists maintain are intended to suppress minority voter turnout or dilute the power of minority voters. Without the protections of the VRA, new laws and policies are again subject to the arduous case-by-case litigation that plagued early efforts to end discriminatory voting practices.
Black representation in government has also continued to see gains but remains uneven, particularly at the state and federal levels. The number of Black representatives in the House is roughly equal to the percentage of the US population that is Black today, 13%, but the number of Senators and Governors remains low—there is just one Black governor in office as of 2024. Research also indicates that the gap between white and non-white voter turnout has grown over the last decade.
While significant progress has been made in voting equality since the civil rights era, ongoing challenges and more recent backsliding suggest the project remains unfinished.
