Hello, this is Michael Moss.

Heather Cox Richardson is traveling today, and her travel arrangements did not allow her time to read today's letter.

So I will be reading it in her place.

August 5, 2025.

60 years ago tomorrow, on August 6th, 2025. 60 years ago tomorrow, on August 6th, 1965,

President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act.

The need for the law was explained in its full title,

an act to enforce the 15th Amendment to the Constitution

and for other purposes. In the wake of the Civil War, Americans tried to create a new nation

in which the law treated black men and white men as equals. In 1865, they ratify the 13th Amendment to the Constitution,

outlawing enslavement except as punishment for crimes. In 1868, they adjusted the Constitution again,

guaranteeing that anyone born or naturalized in the United States, except certain indigenous Americans,

was a citizen, opening up suffrage to black men. In 1870, after Georgia legislators expelled

their newly seated black colleagues, Americans defended the right of black men to vote

by adding that right to the

Constitution. All three of those amendments, the 13th, 14th, and 15th, gave Congress the power to

enforce them. In 1870, Congress established the Department of Justice to do just that. Reactionary white

southerners had been using state laws and the unwillingness of state judges and juries

to protect black Americans from white gangs and cheating employers to keep black people subservient.

White men organized as the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize black men and to keep black people subservient. White men organized as the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize black men

and to keep them and their white allies from voting to change that system. In 1870, the federal

government stepped in to protect black rights and prosecute members of the Ku Klux Klan. With federal power now behind the

...