Voting Rights Act

Act passed by the U.S. Congress in 1965 to ensure the voting rights of African Americans. Though the Constitution's 15th Amendment (passed 1870) had guaranteed the right to vote regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” African Americans in the South faced efforts to disenfranchise them, including poll taxes and literacy tests, as late as the 1960s, when the civil rights movement focused national attention on infringements of their voting rights; Congress responded with the Voting Rights Act, which prohibited Southern states from using literacy tests to determine eligibility to vote. Later laws prohibited literacy tests in all states and made poll taxes illegal in state and local elections.