ABSTRACT
The 1964, Civil Rights Act outlawed segregated public facilities and racial discrimination in employment and education, but in many areas of the South, African Americans were barred from voting. White supremacists utilized a number of tactics to keep Southern blacks disfranchised before 1964, including high poll taxes and literacy tests that kept poor and uneducated African Americans from voting. When a black voting rights activist named Jimmy Lee Jackson was murdered in Alabama in February 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. and other black leaders organized a march from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 banned literacy tests and other methods to disfranchise blacks, forced suspect counties to obtain Justice Department approval when they changed election procedures. It authorized the attorney general of the United States to send federal examiners to register black voters when he concluded that local registrars were not doing their job.
