DeboerMccain592
Your Directly to Vote - A history
The authority to vote during these United states of america is at once both our greatest privilege and our most significant responsibility. For upwards of 220 years brave patriots have shed their blood to support and defend our democracy. Given the need for the upcoming elections, I might hope that everybody that is eligible to vote can do so. Unfortunately, the U.S. has one of many lowest voter participation levels of any democracy on earth. Perhaps a brief exploration of the long, hard fought struggle toward the universal right to vote provides a bit of incentive to really 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 right to vote. Actually, several colonies even had religious requirements to vote, most of which lasted until 1790! Gradually, within the first half of the Nineteenth century, the requirement of property ownership was abolished. As is often the case, sometimes these restrictions are not lifted with out 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 found guilty of treason in 1844 and sentenced alive imprisonment at hard labor (although he was pardoned the next year.)
Following your civil war, in 1870, the 15th Amendment was ratified guaranteeing the best 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 numerous in the its northern border 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 sole once excluded in the vote. Many western states denied the authority to vote to Asian-Americans too.
Through the 1950s, many southern states retained poll taxes and literacy tests made to disenfranchise blacks. In Alabama, as an example, prospective voters were required to provide written strategies to a 20 page test including questions such as: "Name the rights an individual has after he has been indicted with a grand jury." While the Civil Rights Act of 1957 assisted enforcement of voting rights, black voter registration in the south was only increased by around 200,000, just 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 within the city, nevertheless the voter roles were 99% white. Despite their utmost efforts, stiff resistance from the racist and segregationist establishment successfully prevented a good 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 usage of the poll tax. Later that year, President Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, eliminating all litera
