Voting Rights Act of 1965

Lesson Overview

Students have studied the Fifteenth Amendment, which was supposed to have granted African-American male citizens the right to vote, as well as the Nineteenth Amendment which expanded voting rights to include women.  The Jim Crow South and the birth of the Civil Rights Movement have also been topics of study leading up to this point in SC History.

Nationally, in 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson introduced a program known as the Great Society.  The program included low-cost health insurance (Medicare) under Social Security, grants for public schools, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was passed to end discrimination against African-American voters.  This Act actually helped enforce the Fifteenth and Nineteenth amendments, giving African-American men and all women the right to vote without having to take literacy tests. It also required certain southern states that had redrawn voting district lines in order to minimize African-American votes to submit any new redistricting plans to the federal government for approval (Before the Voting Rights Act http://epic.org/privacy/voting/register/intro_a.html)

This strategy is used to break a video into shorter segments with thinking questions for each segment.  Display the thinking questions for each segment prior to showing.