By Elliot Morrison

“Today is a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield.”

President Lyndon Baines Johnson spoke those words on a sweltering August 6th in the Capitol Rotunda forty-four years ago, prior to signing one of the most momentous laws in all of American history: the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Johnson declared that the Act’s purpose was to guarantee a right “which no American, true to our principles, can deny.”

“[T]he time for waiting is gone …,” Johnson told those in the Rotunda and a national audience watching the live broadcast of the ceremony, “the time for failure is gone … And the time for injustice is gone.”

Although this spring’s Supreme Court voting rights rulings underscore the law’s continuing visibility, the dramatic story behind the legislation’s creation—how it grew out of not only civil rights activists’ struggles in the South but also Johnson’s own vision of a “Great Society” in America—is far less known.

That history is important because it illustrates the depth of the resistance to equal rights and Johnson’s firm belief that the Voting Rights Act would change both the legal and social realities facing equal rights advocates.

Johnson noted black Americans’ centuries-long struggle to gain basic civil rights, a struggle which had reached its crescendo earlier that spring with the explosive Selma-to-Montgomery March in Alabama.

Before Selma, Congress—along with much of the country—was still congratulating itself over the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and expecting a breather from civil rights leaders’ demands for further action. After Alabama state troopers and local police viciously clubbed nonviolent protesters to the ground at Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge in early March 1965, the resulting national and worldwide outrage fueled an overwhelming momentum for dismantling the cornerstone of Jim Crow in the South: the region-wide resistance to blacks exercising the right to vote.

A week later, on March 15, as civil rights forces planned a far larger march to the capital of the Old Confederacy, Johnson unveiled the voting rights legislation he had been considering for months. That evening, he spoke to Congress and a national television audience to plead the case directly.

“I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy,” he began, using words that still resonate today. The brutal response of state governments in Alabama and throughout the South, he continued, demanded action: “At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.”

Despite overwhelming evidence of voting rights discrimination, the 1964 Civil Rights Act had not safeguarded “the basic right without which all others are meaningless,” as Johnson would later describe the right to vote at the signing. In the face of such opposition as the country witnessed in Selma, “the existing process of law cannot overcome systematic and ingenious discrimination.” In just a few short months Congress heeded his call.

But how did President Johnson envision the VRA? In his first speech to Congress after President Kennedy’s death, President Johnson described “the dream of equal rights for all Americans, whatever their race or color,” as Kennedy’s top priority, and pledged that it would be his own.

At a time when the nation has elected President Barack Obama as our first African American president, some might say that this dream of equal rights is now a reality. But President Johnson conceived of the VRA as addressing far more entrenched inequalities than one event or person could ever dispel. He distinguished between the law as equality in theory and the intended result of equality in fact. Further, he recognized that the passage of the VRA—as historic an achievement as it was—was only the beginning of a long and difficult process.

President Johnson showed his appreciation for both history and the difference between stated equality and lived equality in his March 15th speech to the nation. “It was more than a hundred years ago that Abraham Lincoln, a great President of another party, signed the Emancipation Proclamation, but emancipation is a proclamation and not a fact.” Merely passing the VRA would not fulfill its promise. In Johnson’s words, “the battle will not be over.” Uniting the country in pursuit of equality, he said that it was not just African Americans, “but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”

He broadened this theme in his remarks at the Howard University Commencement, as Congress approached the end of negotiations. While previous laws had promised equality, Johnson’s agenda was to forge the reality of equality, taking into account “the devastating heritage of long years of slavery; and a century of oppression, hatred, and injustice.” The unequal playing field that confronts African Americans—then, as now—“is the product of a hundred unseen forces,” he said. “This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”

Johnson described symptoms of inequality all too familiar in the modern day. African American unemployment, roughly equal to that of whites in 1930, had risen to twice that of whites by the mid-1960s. The median income of African American men had fallen to nearly half that of white men. Poverty rates were diverging, and the disparity in infant mortality was worsening. He offered his hope that the Great Society program would address many of the ills of poverty, but acknowledged that African American poverty was unique as a “consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.”

Johnson’s words make it clear that he considered the Voting Rights Act the centerpiece of an attack on the broad structural racial inequality of American society. Despite the historic election of President Obama, this inequality persists in the current disparities in unemployment, incarceration, education, and—crucially for the significance of the Voting Rights Act today—elected officials (PDF). Moreover, President Johnson viewed the Act’s innovative provisions as preventing attempts, “however ingenious the effort, to flout our Constitution.” The centerpiece of the law, Section 5, withstood constitutional challenge at the Supreme Court this June in Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One v. Holder, but there are still those who have lost sight of its critical role in preventing discrimination. President Johnson’s broad vision is an important reminder to us all. The Voting Rights Act would be his proudest accomplishment and a great victory for civil rights, he told those future leaders at Howard. But, more importantly, “this victory—as Winston Churchill said of another triumph for freedom—‘is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’ ”

Elliot Morrison is a summer intern at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. He attends Yale Law School.