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On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, calling the day "a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield". The law came seven months after Martin Luther King launched a Southern Christian Leadership Conference campaign based in Selma, Alabama, with the aim of pressuring Congress to pass such legislation.
In addition to facing arbitrary literacy tests and poll taxes, African Americans in Selma and other southern towns were intimidated, harassed and assaulted when they attempted to register to vote. Civil rights activists met with resistance to their campaign, which attracted national attention on March 7, 1965 when civil rights workers were brutally attacked by white law enforcement officers on a march from Selma to Montgomery.
Johnson introduced the Voting Rights Act that same month, and Congress passed the bill in just under four months. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 abolished literacy tests and poll taxes designed to disenfranchise African American voters, and gave the federal government the authority to take over voter registration in counties with a pattern of persistent discrimination.