A handful of key dates in history are like landmarks. They guide us along the path of history, shape our national consciousness and provoke riveting emotions for those who experienced the moment.

For Americans, this weekend will be marked by events commemorating a pivotal event: the 40th anniversary of the Voting Act, which prohibited discrimination in voting practices or procedures based on race or ethnicity.

In Hawai'i, our own congresswoman, the late Patsy Mink, was instrumental in the formation and passage of the Voting Act, which was signed into law on Aug. 6, 1965.

While it has been nearly 150 years since the 15th amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted voting rights to everyone, non-whites in America had not enjoyed the full measure of that freedom.

And the cost of that freedom was exceptionally high.

Many people from Hawai'i made huge sacrifices and involved themselves in the voter registration campaign in the southern states. Southern blacks who tried to register to vote — and people of other races who supported them — were typically harassed, beaten or killed.

For years, hundreds of thousands of people worked and died to secure equal rights for everyone in the United States. And on July 2, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law. Yet some of the southern states still resisted granting voting rights to everyone.

The physical abuse was unimaginable and the economic manipulation deplorable for those who tried to register to vote.

The Selma-to-Montgomery March for voting rights ended three weeks — and three events — that represented the political and emotional peak of the modern civil rights movement. On "Bloody Sunday," March 7, 1965, some 600 civil rights marchers headed east out of Selma on U.S. Route 80.

They got only as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge six blocks away, where state and local lawmen attacked them with billy clubs and tear gas and drove them back into Selma. Two days later on March 9, Martin Luther King, Jr., led a "symbolic" march to the bridge. On Sunday, March 21, about 3,200 marchers set out for Montgomery, walking 12 miles a day and sleeping in fields, in the rain and the mud.

By the time they reached the capitol on Thursday, March 25, they were 25,000-strong, including people from Hawai'i.

"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 (March 7, 1965) in Selma, Alabama. There is no Negro problem. There is no southern problem. There is no northern problem. There is only an American problem," President Johnson said in his message to Congress three weeks after the television images of Bloody Sunday were shown to the world.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which required equal access to public places and outlawed discrimination in employment, was a major victory of the black freedom struggle, but the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was its crowning achievement.

The act had an immediate impact. Within months of its passage on Aug. 6, 1965, 250,000 new black voters had been registered. Winning the right to vote changed the political landscape of the United States. When Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, barely 100 African Americans held elective office in the U.S.; today there are more than 10,000.

The biggest impediment to voting is not the Ku Klux Klan or the White Citizens Council or economic sanctions; it is apathy. The two biggest sources of apathy are oppression and privilege. Privilege enables people to vote their pocketbook, and oppressed people feel there is nothing for which to vote.

Today, far too many people do not appreciate or do not know of the struggles that women, African-Americans, Asians, Pacific islanders and other minorities have gone through for the right to vote.

Consider: