Controversies in Minority Voting: The Voting Rights Act in Perspective. (book reviews)

Asked in the final days of his presidency what he thought his most important accomplishment, Lyndon Baines Johnson replied it was when he signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Few disagree. Indeed, the act may be one of the most important pieces of legislation in this century.

Although the Voting Rights Act's provisions applied to a few political units outside the South, it was aimed primarily at stopping that region's historic practices denying the franchise to African-Americans. Unlike previous legislative attempts to end southern states' wholesale disenfranchisement of their black ...

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