Though the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which prohibits discrimination when it comes to voting was ratified in 1870 it took nearly one hundred years for an act with real teeth to come along and truly fix the myriad of problems with voter discrimination. In 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson signed a bill into law that was known as the Voting Rights Act. Before the Voting Rights Act became a law most southern states had very few registered black voters. Most states had very low numbers of less than forty percent of blacks registered to vote. Mississippi had the particularly low number of only five percent of eligible black people registered to vote. Tennessee was the high water mark for the south in this
