President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law on August 6, 1965. It was a revolutionary law, as there is no such thing as a national election. Every state runs its own election, including its own representatives, senators and presidential electors, to send to Washington to do its bidding, so the federal government had no role in the mechanics of state elections until then.

Martin Luther King pushed Johnson to make it the federal government’s business because states were affirmatively preventing black people, called Negroes at the time by polite society, from registering and voting.

“In Selma,” King wrote, “we see a classic pattern of disenfranchisement typical of the Southern Black Belt areas where Negroes are in the majority” (King, “Selma—The Shame and the Promise”). In addition to facing arbitrary literacy tests and poll taxes, African Americans in Selma and other southern towns were intimidated, harassed, and assaulted when they sought to register to vote. Civil rights activists met with fierce resistance to their campaign, which attracted national attention on 7 March 1965, when civil rights workers were brutally attacked by white law enforcement officers on a march from Selma to Montgomery.

Johnson introduced the Voting Rights Act that same month, “with the outrage of Selma still fresh” (Johnson, “Remarks in the Capitol Rotunda”). In just over four months, Congress passed the bill. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 abolished literacy tests and poll taxes designed to disenfranchise African American voters and gave the federal government the authority to take over voter registration in counties with a pattern of persistent discrimination. “This law covers many pages,” Johnson said before signing the bill, “but the heart of the act is plain. Wherever, by clear and objective standards, States and counties are using regulations, or laws, or tests to deny the right to vote, then they will be struck down” (Johnson, “Remarks in the Capitol Rotunda”).

There were official weapons used to impair the rights of black people to vote, “arbitrary literacy tests and poll taxes,” and there were less official weapons, intimidation, harassment and assault, used against those black people who braved the threat of harm to register to vote and later, on a date fixed by by law for voting, to cast their ballot in a box.

But passing a law, even a federal law, had a long way to go to stop what King understood would continue to happen on the streets of Selma.

Although King called the law “a great step forward in removing all of the remaining obstacles to the right to vote,” he knew that the ballot would only be an effective tool for social change if potential voters rid themselves of the fear associated with voting (King, 5 August 1965).

King understood that no law, by itself, would stop a racist from harassing or assaulting a black person walking into the polling place, and that the fear of harm from braving the threat and exercising the right to vote would be far harder to eradicate than any official racist tools.

Today, the literacy tests and poll taxes are gone, unless you count Florida where people who owe the state money for fines and costs are precluded from voting. There may still be individuals who intimidate, even assault black people on the way to the polling place, but such incidents are no longer pervasive. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a huge step forward in accomplishing what, back in 1965 when civil rights workers marching from Selma to Montgomery were beaten by white police, was still a dream.

Yet, the family of Martin Luther King has asked the nation not to celebrate the day in his honor because Congress has not enacted the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.

Decades later, to mark this year’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday observances, King’s eldest son, Martin Luther King III, his wife Arndrea Waters King, and granddaughter Yolanda Renee King are marching too. They intend to cross literal and symbolic bridges alongside national and grassroots groups, and individual supporters.

“We’re working to restore the very voting rights protections my father and countless other civil rights leaders bled to secure,” said King, chairman of the Drum Major Institute, initially launched in the 1960s. “We will not accept empty promises in pursuit of my father’s dream for a more equal and just America.”

In 1965, you had to go to the city hall, the courthouse, to register to vote. In 1965, you had to go to your polling place on the designated day, Election Day, to cast a paper ballot in a box. King had no dream of making voting so easy, effortless, painless, that one need barely exert a moment’s effort to accomplish it. His dream was that black people could go, without threat or fear, to the polling place on election day and cast a ballot. It involved some sacrifice, taking the time to go there, perhaps missing some work, losing some pay, paying the price of gas or shoe leather, to exercise this civic duty he fought, he bled, to achieve.

The grievance wasn’t the absence of a window of weeks to cast a ballot. Or that it was too burdensome to take an absentee ballot to a mailbox to send in. And then it might need a stamp to be delivered. Or that one might have to stand without water on line because you neglected to bring your own and no neutral was there to hand it out. Yet, this is the new Jim Crow, we’re told. The old Jim Crow would kill you. The new one would leave you parched.

To appreciate where we are, we have to remember where we were when Martin Luther King took to the streets. He didn’t risk inconvenience, but death. He didn’t complain that it wasn’t easy enough to vote, but that no one should risk a beating to vote. Martin Luther King never sought special treatment for black people, but equal treatment.

LBJ’s federal “intrusion” into state affairs to end the denial of equal protection that persisted to prevent black people from exercising their rights as Americans to vote was a very controversial move, but one taken in reaction to the horrific violent racist abuse some states perpetrated on black people. It turned out to be remarkably successful, even if imperfect, so that we find ourselves today fighting over whether a few weeks is enough time to mail in a ballot, and call this Jim Crow on steroids.