Congress Actually Used to Work
What it took to pass the Voting Rights Act
It’s easy to look at Congress right now and wonder if transformative and important legislation can even happen anymore. But the Voting Rights Act is a reminder that the seemingly impossible has happened before. In this piece, Natasha Alford tells the story of how the landmark law came to be, and what it might mean for this moment in history.
—Sharon
When 25-year-old John Lewis stood at the peak of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in March 1965 a terrifying ocean stood before him.
He described it as a “sea of blue Alabama State Troopers.” Like Moses, the activist had come to plead for his people’s freedom: the right to vote, dignity instead of segregation, and an ability to pursue life, liberty, and happiness no matter their race. Alongside him stood other protesters from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, including the organization’s president, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
But instead of that blue sea of troopers parting so that Lewis, King, and their fellow marchers could walk through to make their case, it crashed down upon them in a tsunami of violence. Police batons smashed and whips lashed into the flesh of young and old alike, and blood poured from protesters’ open wounds. As for Lewis, troopers beat him so brutally that his skull fractured, and he was left with scars he’d carry the rest of his life.
That day, known as Bloody Sunday, would be a reckoning for America. As grainy black and white images of horror filled millions of TV screens in homes across the country, it laid the groundwork for the most transformative piece of voting legislation in modern American history. And it wasn’t by accident.
“Our adversaries met us with such unrestrained brutality that they enlarged the issues to a national scale,” wrote King in his autobiography. “The ironic and splendid result of the small Selma project was nothing less than the Voting Rights Act of 1965.”
King chose Selma because it was a city where confrontation could create the kind of national pressure that would force President Lyndon B. Johnson to move on voting rights. The county sheriff, Jim Clark, had a reputation for brutality and had violently arrested numerous civil rights workers. The ground for change in Alabama had also been laid by endless tragedy: the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church that killed four little girls, and, just days before Bloody Sunday, the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a young activist shot by an Alabama state trooper.
Selma was just one of many levers that King and other civil rights leaders pulled to achieve their ultimate goal of getting the Voting Rights Act to the finish line. Beyond leveraging public outrage, it took real bipartisan relationships in the halls of power, and the president’s legislative prowess, to make it happen.
Sixty years later, the Voting Rights Act has been largely gutted, and the perfect storm of political conditions that allowed the bill to pass in the 1960s seems both long gone and impossible to recreate. Still, looking back at what it actually took is the first step toward understanding what might be required of us today if we want to seize that kind of rare moment and once again put the impossible within reach.
Timing and pressure
After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, President Johnson stepped into a role laden with a sense of obligation and moral authority, as Kennedy had died with unfinished business on voting and civil rights.
“It ought to be possible for American citizens of any color to register to vote in a free election without interference or fear of reprisal,” Kennedy had said in a June 1963 address. Earlier that year, he’d pushed for the introduction of civil rights legislation that would have banned discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin at work and in public accommodations, but it had stalled in Congress.
In the wake of Kennedy’s death, Johnson knew getting voting rights across the finish line would be a full-contact sport. His political instincts had been sharpened over decades before he ever reached the Oval Office. The Texas-born Democrat got his start as a congressional secretary, learning how power worked from the inside before winning a House seat at just 28 years old. Almost a decade later, he narrowly won a Senate race and rose to become the youngest Senate majority leader in history.
Johnson had a reputation for relentless networking across party lines, layering Southern charm over cold-blooded arm-twisting to get the votes he needed. The combination became known as “the Johnson Treatment.” At a towering six feet and four inches, he could physically loom over colleagues to flatter them and press his case, while being disciplined about it: as majority leader, Johnson never called a vote until he already knew the outcome.
These were the skills that positioned Johnson to get legislative wins such as the Civil Rights Act of 1957 — the first major civil rights legislation since the Reconstruction era — which established the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department, and empowered federal prosecutors to address interference in voting rights. Johnson also helped pass the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which extended the 1957 act by giving federal judges power to enforce voting rights. By the time he sat in the Oval Office in 1965, he was well versed in negotiating between segregationist Southern Democrats and Northern Republican liberals, managing amendments, and positioning bills to pass even with Southern opposition.
But even with this impressive legislative résumé, as president, Johnson had moments of hesitation.
“I can’t get a voting rights bill through this session of Congress,” he told MLK in a recorded conversation in January 1965, roughly two months before Bloody Sunday.
Johnson feared the timing might be too soon after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and without support from the Southern bloc it wouldn’t be “wise” or “politically expedient” to push forward on voting rights.
But that didn’t stop the push from King and his allies. And in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, they ratcheted up the pressure.
“I don’t see how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam — I don’t see how he can send troops to the Congo — I don’t see how he can send troops to Africa and can’t send troops to Selma,” Lewis said in the aftermath of the attack on protesters.
Undaunted by what happened on Bloody Sunday, two days later King led another, larger protest in Selma, this time receiving help from many white allies and clergy who came to support. The group marched to the top of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where King kneeled and led the group in prayer before they peacefully turned back.
Marchers kneel in prayer at the second civil rights march in Selma
In response, Johnson publicly applauded the nonviolent tactics and promised to put forward a voting rights bill: “Americans everywhere join in deploring the brutality with which a number of Negro citizens of Alabama were treated when they sought to dramatize their deep and sincere interest in attaining the precious right to vote.”
A president with the tactics of a legislator
Johnson directed Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to write the bill, and it was introduced in the Senate on March 17, 1965. The legislation sought to undo the impact of literacy tests, poll taxes, and other Jim Crow tactics meant to keep Black voters from the polls. Tactics that were so successful, only 335 Black people were registered to vote in Selma out of 15,000 eligible voters. In Mississippi, only approximately 6.7 percent of Black voters were registered.
Johnson’s bill would require federal examiners to review voter lists and prepare lists of people qualified to vote, and federal observers to monitor elections in jurisdictions that had previously used literacy tests to suppress voter registration and where less than 50 percent of citizens of voting age had participated in the most recent presidential election.
It would also require these same jurisdictions to get preclearance before changing any voting rules in their communities. The preclearance formula dictated that states with a history of voter suppression must get federal approval before changing any voting rules, putting Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, and South Carolina under direct federal oversight.
But despite Johnson’s public commitment to the cause of voting rights, the same obstacles that blocked JFK from passing civil rights legislation were still before him: staunch segregationist Democrats, conservative Republicans, and the power of filibuster. Democrats had deployed it in the Senate for 60 working days in 1963 to block Kennedy’s civil rights legislation.
Johnson appealed to politicians’ desire for legacy to push the Civil Rights Act through. Princeton University professor and historian Julian Zelizer credits Johnson’s “knowledge of the members on the Hill and the pressure points that could move them” as one of the main reasons he could sway them both on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he told me. “He understood the legislative process, and he was a very skillful lobbyist,” Zelizer said.
When some senators balked at the idea of supporting two big civil rights bills back to back by throwing their weight behind the VRA, Johnson tasked Senator Hubert Humphrey to work with them to gain their support.
Just as important, Johnson was well versed in Senate procedure and knew the bill might get held up in committee, so he set a deadline for when it should be reported out.
As the fight in Congress took place, Johnson also gave a soaring, unifying speech to move the nation’s conscience in the wake of both Selma marches and the murder of a white protester named Viola Liuzzo:
“There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem,” he said, “because it’s not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.”
Soon the tide would start to turn.
Bipartisan support
“Many Southerners did not believe they could mount a full-scale filibuster because they had been defeated on civil rights,” says Zelizer. “The sense, especially after Selma, was that the bill would pass.”
In an outcome that would seem almost impossible today, Johnson managed to build a bipartisan investment in the bill’s success. Supporters included a group of Republican and Democratic senators from Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Hawaii, Pennsylvania, North Dakota, and Missouri. Johnson studied each of these senators, noting the local projects they wanted, their personal motivations for being in office. He also appealed to their dreams of putting their own personal stamp on the bill by allowing some to write in their own amendments.
Unlike today, when liberals are overwhelmingly Democrats and conservatives are typically Republicans and move in lock step, in the 1960s the parties were less ideological. The Democratic Party didn’t entirely oppose voting rights — some Northern Democrats supported them, as did some moderate Republicans.
Johnson also had the benefit of majorities that weren’t as razor-thin as they are in today’s Congress, where it’s nearly impossible to pull more than a handful of Democrats or Republicans across the aisle. In the House, Democrats dominated Republicans 295 to 140, and in the Senate, Democrats led Republicans 68 to 32.
By the time the VRA was introduced in the Senate just ten days after Bloody Sunday, the bill had 66 sponsors — a testament to Johnson’s dealmaking and the impact of the movement. Southern Democrats filibustered for 24 days, claiming the bill’s preclearance regime punished the South and infringed states’ rights.
But their opposition failed. The VRA passed the Senate by a vote of 77 to 19. It passed in the House 333 to 85.
All of Johnson’s focus on building cross-party support, and King and fellow activists’ lobbying, paid off.
A victory that might not endure
When Johnson signed the VRA on August 6, 1965, King was right by his side and received the pen used by the president to make the bill law, like two runners passing a baton after a painful but intelligently run marathon.
Also in the room was John Lewis, the young leader who was willing to put his life on the line for voting rights. Johnson also passed him a signing pen. The pen was an instrument that once might’ve been used to block Lewis and his people from exercising their constitutional rights with questions they were never meant to get right.
Now a pen would be the tool they would use to make a choice at the ballot box.
Mississippi’s Black voter registration would go from 6.7 percent in 1964 to almost 60 percent by 1968.
But all that Lewis fought for saw a significant setback in 2013 with the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby v. Holder, which struck down the preclearance formula that kept states from changing their voting laws without federal approval. Since then, approximately 100 of these laws, such as voter ID requirements, voter roll purges, and mail-in voting restrictions, have been introduced across America, with one-third of them being in states that were previously subject to preclearance. They have disproportionately affected communities of color.
In five of the six states where Black voters previously turned out for elections at higher rates than white voters, the ranking flipped between 2013 and 2020. One study from the Brennan Center analyzing data from 2008 to 2022 shows the racial turnout gap even widened nationwide, growing most quickly in states that had been covered by the preclearance formula.
In recent years, there have been efforts to undo some of the harm of Shelby v. Holder, including by establishing a new formula to determine which states must seek federal approval before changing their voting laws. Foremost among them is the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which passed in the House but has been stalled in the Senate since 2021, unable to overcome a filibuster. It would establish a preclearance formula based on “recent evidence” of election-related discrimination such as changing boundaries to dilute minority voting power or reducing access to multilingual voting material.
In many ways, the John Lewis Act faces a fate that’s grown all too familiar for any ambitious legislation in the last few decades. In 2012, when 20 children were murdered in a gun massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, a groundswell of emotion overtook a nation ready for a bipartisan background-check bill. But the legislation failed by six votes, unable to clear the threshold of the filibuster in the hyperpolarized Congress of the time, no matter the public support it enjoyed or the skill President Obama employed to make a case for it.
By contrast, President Johnson pushed the Voting Rights Act through in just five months in 1965, using his legislative experience, unifying rhetoric, and public pressure to sway an ideologically diverse Congress to do what was right for the nation.
Today, the US has a president who lacks the same bipartisan instincts, and instead demonizes members of the other party as “lunatics.” Meanwhile, President Trump is hypervigilant about “voter fraud,” and a majority of Republican voters believe the 2020 election was stolen. Given that reality, it’s unlikely that the will to protect and expand access to the vote will come from this White House. A deeply polarized House and Senate don’t offer much hope either.
Nevertheless, the greatest lesson from the Civil Rights Era fight about voting rights is that without the people — marching in the streets, creating allyship across racial lines, putting their lives on the line and refusing to let up on the issue — King could not have exercised leverage with Johnson, Johnson could not have put his skills to work, and legislators in Congress could not have been moved to vote their conscience.
“It wasn’t LBJ,” says Zelizer. “It was the Civil Rights Movement that really changed the conventional wisdom on Capitol Hill.”
While the “conventional wisdom” today may say that nothing can get done, perhaps we can begin to tell a different story about how much power the people really hold to disrupt the status quo. It’s the kind of story John Lewis believed in enough to stand at the tip of the Edmund Pettus Bridge and stare down possible defeat, only to live to see the impossible happen.
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