EdensMcgarry151
Your To Vote - A Brief History
The right to vote during these United States are at once both our greatest privilege and our most significant responsibility. For more than 220 years brave patriots have shed their blood to aid and defend our democracy. Due to the importance of the upcoming elections, I might hope that everybody who's permitted vote can do so. Unfortunately, the U.S. has among the lowest voter participation levels of any democracy on the planet. What about a brief exploration of the long, hard fought struggle toward the universal right to vote will provide a little bit of incentive to make it towards the ballot box next month.
As some of my readers may know, if this country was formed, only white male property owners had the right to vote. In fact, several colonies even had religious requirements to vote, many of which lasted until 1790! Gradually, over the first 1 / 2 of the Nineteenth century, the requirement of property ownership was abolished. Out of the box a fact of life, sometimes these restrictions are not lifted with no fight. In 1842, the Dorr war was fought in Rhode Island over this very issue. For his troubles in leading your dream for non-property owners to obtain suffrage, Thomas Dorr is discovered responsible for treason in 1844 and sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor (although he was pardoned the next year.)
After 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 numerous in the its northern border and the south, and downright blasphemous for some. Many schemes were devised to maintain blacks from voting, including poll taxes, literacy tests and cumbersome registration requirements. Blacks, needless to say, were not the only once excluded in the vote. Many western states denied the authority to vote to Asian-Americans also.
Through the 1950s, many southern states retained poll taxes and literacy tests built to disenfranchise blacks. In Alabama, as an example, 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 got been indicted by way of a grand jury." As the Civil Rights Act of 1957 assisted enforcement of voting rights, black voter registration within the south was just increased by about 200,000, only fraction with the eligible black population.
In 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr. launched a voter registration drive in Selma Alabama. At that time, blacks slightly outnumbered whites in the city, nevertheless the voter roles were 99% white. Despite their finest efforts, stiff resistance in the racist and segregationist establishment successfully prevented a single black voter from being added to the rolls.
Dr. King's heroic work, however, stirred the nation. 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
