Civil rights movement

=== Voting Rights Act of 1965 ===
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| title='Remarks on the Signing of the Voting Rights Act'
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Eight days after the first march, but before the final march, President Johnson delivered a televised address to support the voting rights bill he had sent to Congress. In it he stated:

{{blockquote|quote=Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.}}

On August 6, Johnson signed the [[Voting Rights Act of 1965]], which suspended literacy tests and other subjective voter registration tests. It authorized Federal supervision of voter registration in states and individual voting districts where such tests were being used and where African Americans were historically under-represented in voting rolls compared to the eligible population. African Americans who had been barred from registering to vote finally had an alternative to taking suits to local or state courts, which had seldom prosecuted their cases to success. If discrimination in voter registration occurred, the 1965 act authorized the [[Attorney General of the United States]] to send Federal examiners to replace local registrars.

Within months of the bill's passage, 250,000 new black voters had been registered, one-third of them by federal examiners. Within four years, voter registration in the South had more than doubled. In 1965, Mississippi had the highest black voter turnout at 74% and led the nation in the number of black public officials elected. In 1969, Tennessee had a 92% turnout among black voters; Arkansas, 78%; and Texas, 73%.

Several whites who had opposed the Voting Rights Act paid a quick price. In 1966 [[Jim Clark (sheriff)|Sheriff Jim Clark]] of Selma, Alabama, infamous for using [[cattle prod]]s against civil rights marchers, was up for reelection. Although he took off the notorious "Never" pin on his uniform, he was defeated. At the election, Clark lost as blacks voted to get him out of office.

Blacks' regaining the power to vote changed the political landscape of the South. When Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, only about 100 African Americans held elective office, all in northern states. By 1989, there were more than 7,200 African Americans in office, including more than 4,800 in the South. Nearly every county where populations were majority black in Alabama had a black sheriff. Southern blacks held top positions in city, county, and state governments.

Atlanta elected a black mayor, [[Andrew Young]], as did [[Jackson, Mississippi]], with [[Harvey Johnson Jr.]], and [[New Orleans]], with [[Ernest Nathan Morial|Ernest Morial]]. Black politicians on the national level included [[Barbara Jordan]], elected as a Representative from Texas in Congress, and President Jimmy Carter appointed Andrew Young as [[United States Ambassador to the United Nations]]. [[Julian Bond]] was elected to the [[Georgia General Assembly|Georgia State Legislature]] in 1965, although political reaction to his public [[opposition to the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War]] prevented him from taking his seat until 1967. [[John Lewis]] was first elected in 1986 to represent [[Georgia's 5th congressional district]] in the [[United States House of Representatives]], where he served from 1987 until his death in 2020.