Voting Rights Act of 1965
In the 1950s, the Civil Rights Movement increased pressure on the federal government to protect the voting rights of racial minorities. In 1957, Congress passed the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction: the Civil Rights Act of 1957. This legislation authorized the Attorney General to sue for injunctive relief on behalf of persons whose Fifteenth Amendment rights were denied, created the Civil Rights Division within the Department of Justice to enforce civil rights through litigation, and created the Commission on Civil Rights to investigate voting rights deprivations. Further protections were enacted in the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which allowed federal courts to appoint referees to conduct voter registration in jurisdictions that engaged in voting discrimination against racial minorities.
David Nolan (American author)
He was a founder in 2002 of ACCORD (an acronym for "Anniversary to Commemorate the Civil Rights Demonstrations"), a group designed to honor the participants in the St. Augustine movement during the Civil Rights Movement. Demonstrations in St. Augustine in 1963 and 1964 led by Dr.Robert Hayling and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. resulted in the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, one of the two great legislative accomplishments of the movement. ACCORD has launched a permanently marked Freedom Trail of historic sites of the civil rights movement that has gained international publicity.
During Black History Month in 2009, he received the Governor's Points of Light Award for outstanding community service.
On July 2, 2009, the 45th anniversary of the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he received the President's Volunteer Service Award from Barack Obama.