美国选举权法案签署50周年

Thursday marks the 50th anniversary of the signing of the landmark U.S. Voting Rights Act, which provided federal protections for African Americans who sought to exercise their right to vote.

The August 6, 1965 signing of the bill by President Lyndon B. Johnson outlawed legal barriers erected by several states that effectively barred African Americans from the voting booth, despite them being granted those rights

under the 15th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Many of those states were located in the southern United States, which had a long history of racial discrimination dating back to region's era of slavery.

Passage of the Voting Rights Act came after police brutally attacked demonstrators who had begun a peaceful voting rights march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama in March of that year. The incident sparked a national outcry, leading to a historic speech by President Johnson before a joint session of Congress urging passage of the law.

The Voting Rights Act is considered to be the most effective piece of civil rights legislation ever enacted in the United States. It marked the high point of the decade-long Civil Rights Movement, when African Americans publicly demonstrated to bring an end to official racial discrimination and segregation in all aspects of U.S. society.