Minority Voting and Voting Rights: Congress and the Courts

The 1957 Civil Rights Act was the Eisenhower administration&s;s effort to prove that the Party of Lincoln was ready finally to assert itself on behalf of blacks against the Southern Democratic barons. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson again broke with his Southern colleagues to lead the fight for the Civil Rights Act of that year, an extraordinarily ambitious statute that struck at many different kinds of discrimination. The breach in the solid wall of southern resistance to black enfranchisement came only in 1965. It is commonplace for political studies to note the extraordinary effectiveness of the Voting Rights Act in bringing southern black voters into the political system. The great gains in black participation occurred in the first five years of the legislation— 1965-1970. It was then that federal intervention struck down the poll taxes, literacy tests and other restrictive registration procedures.