Key Moments in the Life of the Voting Rights Act
Why Is There a Voting Rights Act? A Timeline
"The Voting Rights Act, among the most consequential pieces of U.S. civil rights legislation, was signed into law in August 1965. It came nearly a century after the 15th Amendment outlawed racial discrimination in voting in 1870.
Despite the amendment, Black Americans had continued to face barriers to one of the nation’s most fundamental rights even after ratification, including violence and intimidation, poll taxes and literacy tests. For many decades before the federal law was passed, activists marched, protested and organized voter registration campaigns. Some were brutally beaten or murdered.
The act required some state and local governments, mostly in the South, to get federal approval before changing their voting laws. It also prohibited election or voting practices that discriminate based on race, which eventually led some states to draw new congressional maps with districts that have a majority of Black voters.
In recent years, the Supreme Court has chipped away at the federal law and its enforcement tools. On Wednesday, the court, which has had a conservative majority, dealt another blow to the historic legislation by throwing out Louisiana’s latest congressional map as an illegal racial gerrymander.
Here’s a look at some events that led to and followed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
MAY TO DECEMBER 1961
The Freedom Rides challenge segregation in public transportation across the South.
The Freedom Rides of 1961 nonviolent strategy aimed to test whether state and local governments were complying with two Supreme Court rulings. One declared that enforcing segregated seating on interstate buses was unconstitutional. The other found that segregated lunch counters, bathrooms and waiting rooms in bus terminals were unconstitutional.
The first Freedom Riders included 13 men and women, both Black and white, who traveled and sat together on interstate buses. The group included 21-year-old John Lewis, who would go on to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives for more than 30 years.
The group planned to ride from Washington to New Orleans on two buses in May 1961. But during multiple stops, they were attacked and beaten and one of the buses was firebombed. The violence forced the Freedom Riders to finish their trip to New Orleans by plane.
More than 400 volunteers participated in the rides, including Doratha Smith-Simmons, known as Dodie, now 82. As an 18-year-old, she rode a bus to a Greyhound station in McComb, Miss., where her group was attacked by a white mob. Ms. Smith-Simmons said recently that while the episode had been terrifying, she “was willing to die for the cause.”
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Collectively, the rides — and the violent pushback from their opposition — helped expose the oppression of Jim Crow laws. They gained national attention and pushed the federal government to enforce desegregation laws.
June to August 1964
Freedom Summer helps register voters in Mississippi.
Freedom Summer was a 1964 campaign led by the Council of Federated Organizations, a coalition of civil rights groups, to register Black voters in Mississippi. More than 700 college students, mostly white and from Northern states, worked with local Black community members over 10 weeks to register voters.
The volunteers distributed registration information, assisted in filling out forms and escorted residents to the courthouses. It was not without risk: Some were beaten and arrested, and their cars were firebombed. Three voting rights activists — Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney — were abducted and murdered outside Philadelphia, Miss.
Of the estimated 17,000 African Americans who tried to register to vote that summer, according to the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, only 1,600 applications were accepted. That low number served as evidence of the state’s exclusion of Black voters.
FEBRUARY 1965
A Voting Rights Activist was killed in Alabama.
Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old Black farmer, was shot by a white Alabama state trooper while participating in a voting rights march in Marion, Ala. His death spurred, in part, the major civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery. At the time, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was leading a campaign in Alabama to fight for voter rights.
March 7, 1965
The Bloody Sunday march in Selma becomes a catalyst for voting rights.
What would become known as Bloody Sunday began as a march of about 600 activists in Selma, Ala., protesting the denial of voting rights and the killing of Mr. Jackson. The march was led by Mr. Lewis, who by then was chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Rev. Hosea Williams of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
As the group crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they were met by Alabama state troopers and sheriff’s deputies wielding billy clubs, bullwhips and tear gas.
Mr. Lewis was beaten and his skull was fractured.
“My legs went out from under me,” he recounted in a 2012 Democracy NOW! interview. “I felt like I was going to die.”
The viciousness of the assault, captured in photos and footage, shocked the national consciousness and built support for the Voting Rights Act.
March 15, 1965
President Lyndon B. Johnson delivers a historic speech, asking Congress to act.
Just after Bloody Sunday, President Lyndon B. Johnson made his powerful “We Shall Overcome” speech to Congress. The televised address was watched by 70 million Americans, according to the White House Historical Association. Mr. Johnson argued that ensuring the right to vote was a fundamental principle of the American promise. He urged Congress to act immediately.
Aug. 6, 1965
The Voting Rights Act is signed into law.
Flanked by senior congressional leaders and leaders of the civil rights movement, Mr. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law days after the House and the Senate approved the measure.
“Today is a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield,” he said at a signing ceremony on Capitol Hill.
The Justice Department quickly started enforcing the legislation, suing over poll taxes in Mississippi, Alabama, Texas and Virginia.
Nov. 7, 1972
The first Black lawmakers are elected to Congress from the South since Reconstruction.
The first Black lawmaker was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1870. But most Black Americans who have served in Congress were elected after the Voting Rights Act, though not all of those representatives were from states directly affected by the act.
The first two Black Southerners to win House seats after the law passed — in fact, since the late 1800s — both won after their districts were redrawn to follow the law.
Barbara Jordan, a former state senator, was elected to a Houston-area seat. Andrew Young, an aide to the Rev. Dr. King, was elected to a Georgia seat that included metro Atlanta. Both ran as Democrats.
Black members of the U.S. House of Representatives
Number of Black representatives in office by election cycle
Voting Rights Act signed
1965
10
20
30
40
50
60
Newly elected
Already in office
1870
1900
’20
’40
’60
’80
2000
’20
1993-2013
Several civil rights leaders take office after winning in majority-minority House districts.
Legal challenges under the Voting Rights Act were reshaping congressional maps across the South. New maps helped several civil rights leaders successfully run for office.
Representatives Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, who would serve as the No. 3 Democrat in the House between 2007 and 2023, and Bobby Scott of Virginia, who remains the top Democrat on the House Education Committee, both took office in January 1993.
That year, Bennie Thompson, now the top Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee, won a special election to represent a Mississippi district that includes the state capital and much of the Mississippi Delta.
June 25, 2013
The Supreme Court strikes down the core of the act with the Shelby v. Holder decision.
In 2013, the Supreme Court ruled that nine states, as well as some counties and municipalities elsewhere in the country, no longer had to receive federal approval to change their election laws.
The ruling effectively struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act. The court split along ideological lines, with the conservative majority essentially finding that federal oversight was no longer needed.
“Our country has changed,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority. “While any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.”
2023-2024
Alabama and Louisiana redraw their congressional maps, as court fights continue over redistricting.
Without federal enforcement, states could redraw their congressional maps in ways that diluted the voting power of Black and other minority residents. When a case challenging a new map in Alabama reached the Supreme Court in 2022, some legal experts expected the conservative majority to strike down what remained of the Voting Rights Act.
But the court rejected Alabama’s map, which included only one majority Black congressional district in a state where Black residents made up about 26 percent of the voting-age population.
That ruling led to a new map not just in Alabama, but in Louisiana, where a similar challenge was unfolding. Under the new maps, each state had two districts where a majority of voters were Black.
And in 2024, Alabama and Louisiana each sent two Black representatives to Congress.
2024
A group of voters challenge Louisiana’s congressional map before the Supreme Court.
Unlike Alabama, where a federal court oversaw the drawing of the new map, Louisiana lawmakers sought to draw their own.
A new map prompted a challenge from a small group of white voters in Louisiana, who argued that the state legislators had discriminated against them by impermissibly taking race into account when they drafted the new map. The Supreme Court heard arguments that fall in the case, Louisiana v. Callais.
Oct. 15, 2025
The Supreme Court again hears Louisiana v. Callais, focusing on the question of using race in redistricting.
Having delayed a clear ruling in Louisiana v. Callais earlier in 2025, the Supreme Court again heard arguments over the state’s new congressional map.
This time, the court focused on whether Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was unconstitutional because it used race as a factor in redistricting.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 on the case, effectively dealing another blow to the Voting Rights Act.
Audra D. S. Burch is a national reporter, based in South Florida and Atlanta, writing about race and identity around the country.
Emily Cochrane is a national reporter for The Times covering the American South, based in Nashville."
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