KainWeiner710
Your Directly to Vote - The
The legal right to vote over these United States are at once both our greatest privilege and our most critical responsibility. For over 200 years brave patriots have shed their blood to aid and defend our democracy. Given the importance of the upcoming elections, I might hope that everyone who is permitted to vote is going to do so. Unfortunately, the U.S. has one of many lowest voter participation degrees of any democracy on earth. What about a brief search for the long, hard fought struggle toward the universal right to vote will provide some incentive to really make it to the ballot box later.
As some of my readers may know, when this country was formed, only white male home owners had the right to vote. In reality, several colonies even had religious requirements to vote, most of which lasted until 1790! Gradually, on the first half of the 1800s, the requirement of property ownership was abolished. As they are often the case, sometimes these restrictions weren't lifted with out 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 was found accountable for 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 right 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 commence to claim this right. During reconstruction, the thought of a black man voting was intimidating to a lot of in the its northern border and also the south, and downright blasphemous with a. Many schemes were devised to keep blacks from voting, including poll taxes, literacy tests and cumbersome registration requirements. Blacks, needless to say, are not 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 designed to disenfranchise blacks. In Alabama, as an example, prospective voters were required to provide written answers to a 20 page test including questions including: "Name the rights one has after he has been indicted by way of a grand jury." Even though the Civil Rights Act of 1957 assisted enforcement of voting rights, black voter registration within the south only agreed to be increased by about 200,000, only fraction from the eligible black population.
In 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr. launched a voter registration drive in Selma Alabama. During those times, blacks slightly outnumbered whites inside the city, nevertheless the voter roles were 99% white. Despite their best efforts, stiff resistance from the racist and segregationist establishment successfully prevented a good single black voter from being included with 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
