August 6 · This Day in America
Ninety-five years after the Fifteenth Amendment promised that the right to vote could not be denied by race, the promise is still being broken — by literacy tests, poll taxes, and the violence that enforced them. Then comes Selma: marchers beaten on a bridge while the country watches on television. On August 6, 1965, in a room off the Senate chamber, with Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks and a young John Lewis looking on, President Lyndon Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act. It outlaws the tests, sends federal examiners into the South, and gives the long-empty Fifteenth Amendment teeth. By the end of the year, a quarter of a million new Black voters are registered. It is the closest the nation has come to keeping a hundred-year-old word.
Source: www.archives.gov
Also on this day · 1926
On August 6, 1926, a 20-year-old American, Gertrude Ederle, becomes the first woman to swim the English Channel — and does it nearly two hours faster than any man before her. Told by a boat to give up in the rough water, she answered, "What for?" New York gave her a ticker-tape parade. She had not just crossed a channel; she had crossed an argument about what women's bodies could do.
Source: www.womenshistory.org
“The right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless.”President Lyndon B. Johnson, signing the Voting Rights Act, 1965