Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (Oxford History of the United States Book 10)

by James T. Patterson

Notwithstanding these developments, which upset Johnson and his inner circle, there was no denying that the Voting Rights Act of 1965, like the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was a great achievement: these were the most significant of the many Great Society laws that expanded rights-consciousness in America. If most of the credit for the voting law belonged to civil rights activists, Johnson and fellow liberals deserved some praise as well. The goal of the act, after all, was to guarantee long-disfranchised black Americans the rights to register and to vote. This end the law accomplished brilliantly, thanks in large part to vigorous and unyielding federal oversight in the years ahead. By 1967 more than 50 percent of voting-age blacks had the franchise in the six most discriminatory southern states. In 1968 there were blacks in the Mississippi delegation to the Democratic National Convention. By the mid-1970s southern blacks began to win electoral office, even in Congress. The increase in black registration was so remarkable that southern white politicians, Wallace included, began by then to soften their racist rhetoric in order to capture some of the black vote.