In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law with Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks in attendance.
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| Dr. King and President Johnson |
Today, 48 years later the country has come a long way....and the journey to voter discrimination still is not over. Just this year the Supreme Court decided to strike down a central part of the landmark law.
What does this mean for us???? This means we have to work harder than ever to get out the vote and work in our local communities to ensure that we get our right to vote AND exercise it!
About the Voting Rights Act...
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 (42 U.S.C. §§ 1973–1973aa-6)[2] is a landmark piece of national legislation in the United States that prohibits discrimination in voting.[3] Echoing the language of the 15th Amendment, the Act prohibits states and local governments from imposing 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."[4] Specifically, Congress intended the Act to outlaw the practice of requiring otherwise qualified voters to pass literacy tests in order to register to vote, a principal means by which Southern states had preventedAfrican Americans from exercising the franchise.[3] The Act was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had earlier signed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. Read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965
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