A challenge to the Voting Rights Act: the Supreme Court is considering whether a key provision of the 1965 law still makes sense in a very different nation.

• Author: Liptak, Adam
• Position: NATIONAL

On Aug. 6, 1965, some of the nation's most important civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., gathered in the Capitol Rotunda to watch President Lyndon B. Johnson sign the Voting Rights Act into law.

"Today is a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that's ever been won on any battlefield," Johnson said.

One of the signature accomplishments of the civil rights era, the Act outlawed poll taxes and literacy tests that had long been used, mainly in the South, to prevent blacks from voting.

Nearly half a century later, the Supreme Court has agreed to consider whether a key provision of the Act is still necessary to protect the rights of blacks and other minorities in a nation that has changed enormously since the 1960s.

The provision's challengers say that the re-election of Barack Obama, the nation's first black president, is proof that the country has moved beyond the racial divisions that necessitated federal efforts to protect the integrity of elections in the South.

The voting rights law "is stuck in a Jim Crowera time warp," says Edward Blum, director of the Project on Fair Representation, a legal foundation that helped organize the lawsuit.

But civil rights leaders point to the role the law played in the 2012 presidential election. Courts relied on it to block voter ID requirements and cutbacks on early voting that critics say were intended to curb minority voting.

"In the midst of the recent assault on voter access, the Voting Rights Act is playing a pivotal role beating back discriminatory voting measures," says Debo Adegbile of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

The Voting Rights Act was intended to help enforce the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed the right to vote regardless of a person's race. It was ratified in 1870, five years after the Civil War ended.

But after federal troops left the South at the end of Reconstruction in 1877, white leaders began circumventing the 15th Amendment: They used poll taxes, literacy tests, and intimidation to prevent most blacks from voting. By 1940, only 3 percent of blacks in the South were registered to vote.

At Issue: Section 5

Along with ending segregation, ensuring people's ability to vote was one of the major accomplishments of the civil rights movement. The Voting Rights Act not only outlawed tactics meant to keep blacks from the polls, it also established federal oversight of how elections are carried out, in the South and in other places with a history of...