At the height of the civil rights movement of the sixties, thousands of people risked their lives to change a system of widespread, blatant racism that kept millions of people from participating in the most basic civic engagement - the right to vote. Since the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed to ensure that people of color had equal access to the polls it has been renewed and extended four times, most recently in August 2007. Originally focused on preventing racial discrimination, this important law has evolved in the past four decades to protect more communities who sometimes face difficulty in voting: people of color, people with disabilities, people with limited English proficiency, and others.