PittWooten696
Your To Vote - The
The legal right to vote over these United states of america reaches once both our greatest privilege and our most important responsibility. For upwards of 220 years brave patriots have shed their blood to aid and defend our democracy. Because of the need for the upcoming elections, I might hope that everybody who's eligible to vote can do so. Unfortunately, the U.S. has among the lowest voter participation amounts of any democracy on earth. Perhaps a brief search for the long, hard fought struggle toward the universal to vote will provide some incentive making it to the ballot box next month.
As some of my readers may have heard, once this country was formed, only white male property owners had the authority to vote. In reality, several colonies even had religious requirements to vote, most of which lasted until 1790! Gradually, on the first 1 / 2 of the Nineteenth century, the necessity for property ownership was abolished. As they are 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 your dream for non-property proprietors 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 concept of a black man voting was intimidating to numerous both in north of manchester 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, of course, weren't the only once excluded from your vote. Many western states denied the legal right to vote to Asian-Americans too.
From 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 been indicted with a grand jury." As the Civil Rights Act of 1957 assisted enforcement of voting rights, black voter registration within the south was only increased by about 200,000, a mere fraction from 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 best efforts, stiff resistance from 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 usage of the poll tax. Later that year, President Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, eliminating all litera
