Youth vote poster
In the mid-1960s, violent clashes occurred over the issue of voting rights and racially discriminatory voting practices. Twenty-five thousand people marched from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in March 1965 to protest illegal barriers to voter registration. Later that year the Voting Rights Act authorized federal examiners to register voters. It also banned abuses such as literacy tests; limiting voter registration to those whose fathers and grandfathers had once voted; and primaries in which only white voters could participate. By the end of 1965, 250,000 new African American voters had been registered, one-third of them by federal examiners. This Selma marcher became an icon of the struggle for voting rights in posters that encouraged newly enfranchised youth to vote in the election of 1972.
