JolleyArgo151
Your To Vote - A history
The right to vote in these United states of america are at once both our greatest privilege and our most significant responsibility. For upwards of Two centuries brave patriots have shed their blood to guide and defend our democracy. Given the need for the upcoming elections, I'd hope that everybody who's eligible to vote can do so. Unfortunately, the U.S. has one of the lowest voter participation levels of any democracy in the world. Perhaps a brief search for the long, hard fought struggle toward the universal right to vote provides some incentive to make it towards the ballot box the following month.
As a number of my readers may know, if this country was formed, only white male property owners had the authority to vote. In reality, several colonies even had religious requirements to vote, some of which lasted until 1790! Gradually, over the first half of the 1800s, the necessity for property ownership was abolished. As they are often the case, sometimes these restrictions were not lifted with no fight. In 1842, the Dorr war was fought in Rhode Island over this very issue. For his troubles in leading the fight for non-property owners to obtain suffrage, Thomas Dorr is discovered responsible for treason in 1844 and sentenced your imprisonment at hard labor (although he was pardoned the next year.)
Following the civil war, in 1870, the 15th Amendment was ratified guaranteeing the right of U.S. citizens to vote without regard to race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Tragically, another century would pass before persons of color could fully start to claim this right. During reconstruction, the idea of a black man voting was intimidating to many in north of manchester and also the south, and downright blasphemous to some. Many schemes were devised to keep blacks from voting, including poll taxes, literacy tests and cumbersome registration requirements. Blacks, needless to say, were not the sole once excluded from the vote. Many western states denied the legal right to vote to Asian-Americans as well.
From the 1950s, many southern states retained poll taxes and literacy tests built to disenfranchise blacks. In Alabama, for instance, prospective voters were required to provide written answers to a 20 page test including questions such as: "Name the rights a person has after he's been indicted by way of a grand jury." While the Civil Rights Act of 1957 assisted enforcement of voting rights, black voter registration in the south only agreed to be increased by about 200,000, just fraction from the eligible black population.
In 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr. launched a voter registration drive in Selma Alabama. During those times, blacks slightly outnumbered whites within the city, nevertheless the voter roles were 99% white. Despite their best efforts, stiff resistance from the racist and segregationist establishment successfully prevented even a single black voter from being put into the rolls.
Dr. King's heroic work, however, stirred the country. On January 23, 1965, the 24th Amendment was passed banning the use of the poll tax. Later that year, President Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, eliminating all litera
