Federal examiners register 27,000 Black voters in Mississippi and Alabama within first weeks of VRA

Within days of the Voting Rights Act taking effect, federal examiners deployed by the Justice Department begin registering Black voters in Mississippi, Alabama, and other covered Southern states. By the end of 1965, a quarter of a million new Black voters are registered across the covered states, one-third of them through federal examiners. Registration rates for Black voters in the South, which had stood at roughly 30% before the law, begin climbing rapidly toward parity with white voter registration rates.