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Your Directly to Vote - A Brief History
The right to vote over these United states of america reaches once both our greatest privilege and our most significant responsibility. For more than Two centuries brave patriots have shed their blood to support and defend our democracy. Given the need for the upcoming elections, I'd hope which everybody who's permitted vote will do so. Unfortunately, the U.S. has among the lowest voter participation levels of any democracy in the world. Why not a brief exploration of the long, hard fought struggle toward the universal to vote will give you a little bit of incentive to make it to the ballot box the following month.
As some of my readers may have heard, once this country was formed, only white male homeowners had the legal right to vote. In reality, several colonies even had religious requirements to vote, some of which lasted until 1790! Gradually, within the first half of the 19th century, the requirement of property ownership was abolished. Out of the box often the case, sometimes these restrictions weren't lifted without a 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 proprietors to obtain suffrage, Thomas Dorr was discovered guilty of treason in 1844 and sentenced alive imprisonment at hard labor (although he was pardoned the next year.)
Following the civil war, in 1870, the 15th Amendment was ratified guaranteeing the proper 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 begin to claim this right. During reconstruction, the thought of a black man voting was intimidating to many in its northern border and also the south, and downright blasphemous with a. Many schemes were devised to help keep blacks from voting, including poll taxes, literacy tests and cumbersome registration requirements. Blacks, needless to say, weren't the only once excluded in the vote. Many western states denied the authority to vote to Asian-Americans as well.
With the 1950s, many southern states retained poll taxes and literacy tests built to disenfranchise blacks. In Alabama, as an example, prospective voters was required to provide written solutions to a 20 page test including questions including: "Name the rights an individual has after he's got been indicted by a grand jury." While the Civil Rights Act of 1957 assisted enforcement of voting rights, black voter registration inside the south was just increased by around 200,000, a mere fraction of the eligible black population.
In 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr. launched a voter registration drive in Selma Alabama. In those days, blacks slightly outnumbered whites in the city, however the voter roles were 99% white. Despite their best efforts, stiff resistance from your 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 nation. On January 23, 1965, the 24th Amendment was passed banning using the poll tax. Later that year, President Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, eliminating all litera
