Entrenched interests in the antebellum South resisted the idea of freeing slaves, just as the former Confederate states resisted any measures allowing equality for freedmen after the Civil War. Jim Crow laws evolved into literacy tests for polls, to keep the African-American population disenfranchised, while a number of legal cases allowed segregation, if not outright discrimination — and anyone fighting for inclusion or equality was subjected to harsh vigilante justice. Such a system could not be reversed overnight — Congress and President Lyndon B. Johnson took a more gradual approach.

On this day, August 6, in 1965, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights act of 1965, a landmark piece of legislation that outlawed discriminatory practices against women and African Americans in deciding who was fit to vote. The letter of the law proscribed any “voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure … to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.”

The act was a natural complement to another landmark legislative act passed the previous year, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, that prohibited segregation in public spaces, defined as any spaces that received any federal funding — effectively, just about everywhere. As President Johnson said in his introduction of the act in Congress “Rarely are we met with a challenge…..to the values and the purposes and the meaning of our beloved Nation. The issue of equal rights [for African Americans] is such as an issue…..the command of the Constitution is plain. It is wrong – deadly wrong – to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to  vote in this country.”