Republicans passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act

From Michael Zak's Grand Old Partisan Blog: On [this day] forty-two[sic] years ago, the 1965 Voting Rights Act was signed into law. Contrary to myth, Republicans supported this law much more than did the Democrats. In the Senate, 94% of Republicans voted in favor, while just 73% of Democrats voted for it. In the U.S. House of Representatives, 82% of Republicans voted in favor, compared to 78% for the Democrats.

Senator Everett Dirksen (R-IL), co-author of the law, helped outmaneuver Democrat opposition: "There has to be a real remedy. There has to be something durable and worthwhile. This cannot go on forever, this denial of the right to vote by ruses and devices and tests and whatever the mind can contrive to either make it very difficult or to make it impossible to vote."

The 1965 Voting Rights Act achieved for African-Americans a major goal of the GOP's Reconstruction Era-civil rights agenda, which the Democrats had blocked a century earlier.

Michael Zak is the author of Back to Basics for the Republican Party.