The master civil rights narrative with which most of us are familiar recounts the lone leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., directing a series of great events that resulted in the Second Great Emancipation. From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, newspaper headlines and television broadcasts followed Dr. King and his desegregation campaigns through Montgomery, Birmingham, Albany, St. Augustine, and the March on Washington.

      In similar fashion, the chronicle of the voting rights struggle usually starts with Dr. King’s campaign in Selma, Alabama and ends with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Selma marked the culmination, yet that event was not the totality of the battle for black ballots. It is important to remember that while highly publicized episodes such as those at Selma were taking blacks, black and white suffrage workers engaged in creative efforts to break down barriers that prevented a majority of African Americans in the South from registering to vote and participating in the electoral process. Those workers and their groups mainly functioned out of the limelight, but like Dr. King, they too learned the necessity of boldly catching attention of the public and pressuring national representations to take action to restore the right to vote. This Article focuses on the success of suffragists in obtaining the Voting Rights Act of 1965.