(Otoh Selma resident Annie Lee Cooper trying to become a registered voter and getting sneeringly turned down in the third scene of the movie makes for an incredibly powerful statement of what's at stake - apparantly still or again is, since DuVernay and David Oyelowo say on the audio commentary there are new laws taking back what's been achieved in Selma right now?)
The Voting Rights Act which was signed into law because of these events had a section which said that certain states were under stricter scrutiny when passing laws impacting voting--if they wanted to pass a law restricting voting in any way, those laws had to pass pre-screening from the Department of Justice to make sure that the laws weren't impacting racial minorities disproportionately. The states named in the act could get out of this requirement by proving that they had improved voter turnout among racial minorities, but none of them ever did.
In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down the pre-screening requirement, for reasons that were vague at best and completely disingenuous at worst, and almost every single one of the states there named immediately brought forth legislation to require IDs at polling places. Which wouldn't be too bad if everyone in America got an ID for free, but it turns out that official state identification costs time and money to get, and a lot of people who don't need to drive (driver's licenses being the most common form of ID in the country) and don't have the money don't bother to get one. Which means that this primarily affects poor people, and being poor and being nonwhite correlate really strongly in this country! Hooray!
So there are all these people passing voter ID laws claiming that no, they're not trying to keep people from voting, they're trying to combat VOTER FRAUD. Which, since even before these laws one did have to register to vote, is a ridiculous claim. There have been very, very few cases of actual voter/voter registration fraud in the past few elections, and most of them have been wealthy white people who have been campaigning for voter ID legislation accidentally forgetting which of their houses they have as their primary address and voting in the wrong place. (I almost wish I were making this up.)
I can look up more details if you're curious, but it's only slightly less criminal than straight-up poll taxing. And because the prescreening requirement is gone from the VRA, the only recourse is to have impacted people sue with the DOJ and bring cases against the laws that way, but that's much slower.
On voting in the USA
The Voting Rights Act which was signed into law because of these events had a section which said that certain states were under stricter scrutiny when passing laws impacting voting--if they wanted to pass a law restricting voting in any way, those laws had to pass pre-screening from the Department of Justice to make sure that the laws weren't impacting racial minorities disproportionately. The states named in the act could get out of this requirement by proving that they had improved voter turnout among racial minorities, but none of them ever did.
In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down the pre-screening requirement, for reasons that were vague at best and completely disingenuous at worst, and almost every single one of the states there named immediately brought forth legislation to require IDs at polling places. Which wouldn't be too bad if everyone in America got an ID for free, but it turns out that official state identification costs time and money to get, and a lot of people who don't need to drive (driver's licenses being the most common form of ID in the country) and don't have the money don't bother to get one. Which means that this primarily affects poor people, and being poor and being nonwhite correlate really strongly in this country! Hooray!
So there are all these people passing voter ID laws claiming that no, they're not trying to keep people from voting, they're trying to combat VOTER FRAUD. Which, since even before these laws one did have to register to vote, is a ridiculous claim. There have been very, very few cases of actual voter/voter registration fraud in the past few elections, and most of them have been wealthy white people who have been campaigning for voter ID legislation accidentally forgetting which of their houses they have as their primary address and voting in the wrong place. (I almost wish I were making this up.)
I can look up more details if you're curious, but it's only slightly less criminal than straight-up poll taxing. And because the prescreening requirement is gone from the VRA, the only recourse is to have impacted people sue with the DOJ and bring cases against the laws that way, but that's much slower.