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Your To Vote - The
The authority to vote in these United States is at once both our greatest privilege and our most critical responsibility. For more than Two centuries brave patriots have shed their blood to guide and defend our democracy. Because of the importance of the upcoming elections, I might hope that everybody who's eligible to vote can do so. Unfortunately, the U.S. has one of many lowest voter participation degrees of any democracy in the world. What about a brief exploration of the long, hard fought struggle toward the universal to vote will give you a bit of incentive making it to the ballot box later.
As a few of my readers may know, when this country was formed, only white male property owners had the legal right to vote. In fact, several colonies even had religious requirements to vote, most of which lasted until 1790! Gradually, over the first half of the Nineteenth century, the necessity for property ownership was abolished. As they are necessary, sometimes these restrictions are not lifted without a fight. In 1842, the Dorr war was fought in Rhode Island over this very issue. For his troubles in leading the battle for non-property keepers to obtain suffrage, Thomas Dorr is discovered guilty of 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 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 start to claim this right. During reconstruction, the thought of a black man voting was intimidating to many both in the north and the south, and downright blasphemous for some. Many schemes were devised to keep blacks from voting, including poll taxes, literacy tests and cumbersome registration requirements. Blacks, obviously, are not the sole once excluded in the vote. Many western states denied the right to vote to Asian-Americans also.
With the 1950s, many southern states retained poll taxes and literacy tests built to disenfranchise blacks. In Alabama, for example, prospective voters were required to provide written strategies to a 20 page test including questions such as: "Name the rights one has after he has been indicted with a grand jury." Even though the Civil Rights Act of 1957 assisted enforcement of voting rights, black voter registration inside the south only agreed to be increased by about 200,000, a mere 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 inside the city, however the voter roles were 99% white. Despite their utmost efforts, stiff resistance in the racist and segregationist establishment successfully prevented a single black voter from being put into the rolls.
Dr. King's heroic work, however, stirred the world. 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
