Voting+Rights+Act+of+1965

__**President Lyndon B. Johnson gives Dr. Martin Luther King one of the pens to sign the Voting Rights Act of 1965.**[|1]__

The Voting Rights Act was created in 1965 and is a landmark in the United States that outlawed discriminatory voting practices that had been responsible for the widespread disenfranchisement of Adrican Americans. It is considerd to me the most succesful piece of civil rights legislation ever adopted in the United States. [|2]

The legislation attempted to deal with the problem of African Americans being denied the vote in the Deep South. The legislation stated that uniform standards must prevail for establishing the right to vote. Schooling to sixth grade constituted legal proof of literacy and the attorney general was given power to initiate legal action in any area where he found a pattern of resistance to the law.

The following year, President Lyndon Baines Johnson attempted to persuade Congress to pass his Voting Rights Act. This proposed legislation removed the right of states to impose restrictions on who could vote in elections. Johnson explained how: "Every American citizen must have an equal right to vote. Yet the harsh fact is that in many places in this country men and women are kept from voting simply because they are Negroes."

The Voting Rights Act was passed by large majorities in the House of Representative and the Senate. The legislation empowered the national government to register those whom the states refused to put on the voting list. When President Johnson signed the Civil Rights act he made a prediction he was “signing away the south for 50 years”. The Act also banned racial discrimination in voting practices by the government as well as by states. [|**3**]

**__Voting Rights for African Americans[|4]__**