Coming five months after the Selma marches and 'Bloody Sunday,' the Voting Rights Act banned literacy tests and authorized federal oversight of elections in states with histories of discrimination. Johnson signed it in the President's Room of the Capitol, the same room Lincoln had used to sign a proclamation freeing slaves who fought for the Union. Black voter registration in the South surged within months.
Lyndon Johnson had watched televised footage of Alabama state troopers beating peaceful marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in March 1965, and within a week he had gone before Congress to demand action, closing his speech with the words of the movement's own anthem: 'We shall overcome.' The bill that followed moved through Congress with unusual speed for civil rights legislation, passing the Senate 77–19 and the House 328–74.
Johnson chose to sign it not at the White House but in the Capitol's President's Room, deliberately echoing Abraham Lincoln's 1862 signing of a bill freeing slaves who enlisted in the Union Army. Martin Luther King Jr. stood among the witnesses. The law suspended literacy tests and other devices used to bar Black voters, and it required jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to get federal approval — 'preclearance' — before changing voting rules.
The effects were immediate and measurable. In Mississippi, Black voter registration rose from about 7 percent to nearly 60 percent within three years. The Act would be renewed repeatedly over the following decades, though its preclearance formula was gutted by the Supreme Court's 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, reigniting the very battles it had been written to end.