t, and he
signed it on 6 August 1965. Two days later federal examiners were on
the job in three states. The act promised a tremendous difference in
the political complexion of significant portions of the country. In
less than a year federal examiners certified 124,000 new voters in
four states and almost half of all eligible Negroes were registered to
vote in the states and counties covered by the law. Another result of
the new legislation was that the Attorney General played an active
role in the 1966 defeat of the state poll tax laws in _Harper_ v.
_Virginia Board of Elections_.[23-29]

[Footnote 23-29: 383 U.S. 663 (1966).]

Useful against legalized discrimination, chiefly in the south, the
civil rights laws of the mid-1960's were conspicuously less successful
in those areas where discrimination operated outside the law. In the
great urban centers of the north and west, home of some 45 percent of
the black population, _de facto_ segregation in housing, employment,
and education had excluded millions of Negroes from the benefits of
economic progress. This ghettoization, this failure to meet human
needs, led to the alienation of many young Americans and a bitter
resentment against society that was dramatized just five days after
the signing of the 1965 voting rights act when the Watts section of
Los Angeles exploded in flames and violence. There had been racial
unrest before, especially during the two previous summers when
flare-ups occurred in Cambridge (Maryland), Philadelphia,
Jacksonville, Brooklyn, Cleveland, and elsewhere, but Watts was a
different matter. Before the California National Guard with some
logistical help from the Army quelled the riots, thirty-four people
were killed, some 4,000 arrested, and $35 million worth of property
damaged or destroyed. The greatest civil disturbance since the 1943
Detroit riot, Watts was but the first in a series of urban (p. 590)
disturbances which refuted the general belief that the race problem
had been largely solved in cities of the north and the west.[23-30]

[Footnote 23-30: For an account of the Watts riot and
its aftermath, see Robert Conot, _Rivers of Blood,
Years of Darkness_ (New York: Bantam Books, 1967),
and Anthony Platt, ed., _The Politics of Riot
Commissions_ (New York: Collin Books, 1971), ch.
vi.]

Discrimination