When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law on August 6, 1965, he declared that “we will not delay, or we will not hesitate, or we will not turn aside until Americans of every race and color and origin in this country have the same right as all others to share in the process of democracy.” The Voting Rights Act is arguably the most important civil rights legislation ever enacted by Congress. The act is meant to enforce a promise made nearly one hundred years earlier by the Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution that access to the ballot will not be predicated on one's "race, color, or previous condition of servitude." In a greater sense, however, the act is an important milestone in the American journey to bring the ideal expressed in the Declaration of Independence "that all men are created equal" to fruition.
The journey leading to the Voting Rights Act began in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Constitutional amendments abolishing slavery and giving citizenship and the ballot to those formerly enslaved were quickly blunted by efforts to deny voting rights after the end of Reconstruction. The resulting struggle over the question of which Americans get to participate in the political process lasted almost a century. That struggle was fought in courtrooms, statehouses, and along roads and highways across America, including in California. That century also witnessed the extension of voting rights to women and to individuals born on American soil. This increased access to the ballot, often won only after bloody confrontation, has helped make America's electorate and politicians look more like the American people themselves.