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The Solid South was the electoral voting bloc for the Democratic Party in the Southern United States between the end of the Reconstruction era in 1877 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. [1] [2] During this period, the Democratic Party controlled southern state legislatures and most local, state and federal officeholders in the South were Democrats.
A further significant item of legislation was the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which targeted for preclearance by the U.S. Department of Justice any election-law change in areas where African-American voting participation was lower than the norm (most but not all of these areas were in the South); the effect of the Voting Rights Act on southern ...
March 30 – June 10, 1964: The longest filibuster in the history of the Senate was waged against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, with 57 days of debate over a 73-day period. It ended when the Senate voted 71–29 to invoke cloture , with the filibuster carried out by southern members of the Democratic Party, the first successful cloture motion ...
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a landmark piece of federal legislation in the United States that prohibits racial discrimination in voting. [ 7 ] [ 8 ] It was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson during the height of the civil rights movement on August 6, 1965, and Congress later amended the Act five times to expand its protections ...
The coverage formula, contained in Section 4(b) of the Act, determines which states are subject to preclearance. As enacted in 1965, the first element in the formula was whether, on November 1, 1964, the state or a political subdivision of the state maintained a "test or device" restricting the opportunity to register and vote.
In August 1965, law school student Mitch McConnell was in his 20s and a veteran of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where he heard Martin Luther King Jr. deliver the "I Have a Dream ...
Iowa restores the voting rights of felons who completed their prison sentences. [59] Nebraska ends lifetime disenfranchisement of people with felonies but adds a five-year waiting period. [62] 2006. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was extended for the fourth time by President George W. Bush, being the second extension of 25 years. [64]
In 2013, the Supreme Court effectively gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act that had required local election officials in areas with a history of discrimination to run their laws by the ...