1975 Voting Rights Act

President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act (VRA), a landmark civil rights law that outlaws poll taxes, literacy tests and other discriminatory tactics aimed at preventing Blacks from exercising their right to vote. The law also establishes federal oversight in state and local elections with a long history of denying blacks access to the ballot box. The law’s protections extend to Puerto Ricans, but not to Latino citizens in the Southwest or language minorities. (Photo Credit: LBJ Photo Archive: Image A1030-19a)

Al I. Perez joins MALDEF’s Washington D.C. office and requests that the organization work to amend the VRA to address the problems facing Latino voters in Texas and the Southwest with the specific aim of extending the law’s requirement for preclearance – -in which a jurisdiction must obtain federal approval to change its election laws — to cover geographic areas where there are a significant number of Mexican Americans.

Lawrence Glick of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights contacts Reston to discuss staff interviews and data collected by the commission on voting rights issues facing Mexican Americans.

Reston sends a memo to Tatel stating that Assistant U.S. Attorney General J. Stanley Pottinger had previously issued a “Memorandum of Decision” that lays out that only complaints received from blacks and Puerto Ricans are protected by the VRA.

News reports reveal 18 members of the commission’s staff sent a memo months earlier raising concerns over the study of voting rights problems in the Southwest.  The memo notes the study is limited at the request of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.

MALDEF petitions the U.S. Attorney General’s Civil Rights Division to use its power under the 1965 Voting Rights Act to determine whether an election held in English in areas where there are substantial number of Spanish-speaking voters is a violation of Section 4 (b) of the act. The letter calls attention to the likelihood that DOJ believes that language minorities are not protected under the VRA and, therefore, the act should be expanded to include such voters.

The U.S. Civil Rights Commission tentatively endorses the expansion of the VRA to include Spanish-speaking people when it releases its 478-page report recommending the extension of the VRA by Congress.

 U.S. Representative Barbara Jordan of Houston, who initially was reluctant to support expansion, is convinced  by evidence of discriminatory voting practices used against Latinos, and introduces legislation to extend the VRA provisions to Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and parts of Colorado and California.

Clarence Mitchell, legislative director of the U.S. Leadership Conference, testifies before the Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the House Committee, urging lawmakers to take up the issue of coverage for language minorities as a separate law because he fears it will jeopardize the extension of the VRA. He tells The Washington Post that waiting for the addition of the language-minority amendment to the VRA could “improve it out of existence”.

The House of Representatives passes H.R. 6219, which amends the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to extend certain provisions for seven years, including the VRA’s Section 5 provision for preclearance, also expanded to cover Texas and parts of the Southwest. H.R. 6219 also permanently bans certain prerequisites to voting and includes new protections for language minorities, such as the requirement of multilingual voting materials.

Modesto Rodriguez is arrested and beaten nearly to death by police outside of a bar where he was trying to recruit other Chicano voters to testify about voting discrimination before Congress.