"Senator Byrd's final year in Congress would be 1965. His final battle was against the Voting Rights Bill of 1965. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., had dramatized the issue by leading a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to protest exclusion of blacks from voting. President Johnson used the momentum to seek immediate passage of a bill that would require Federal intervention in States that used poll taxes, literacy tests, and other means to exclude black voters. Byrd considered the bill "vicious" and "iniquitous in effect and contemptible in design." In August, over his protests, the bill was enacted."