VallejosChao657
Your Right to Vote - A history
The right to vote over these Usa reaches once both our greatest privilege and our most important responsibility. For over 200 years brave patriots have shed their blood to support and defend our democracy. Due to the importance of the upcoming elections, I might hope that everybody who is eligible to vote will do so. Unfortunately, the U.S. has one of the lowest voter participation degrees of any democracy on earth. Perhaps a brief investigation of the long, hard fought struggle toward the universal to vote will provide some incentive to make it for the ballot box the following month.
As a few of my readers may have heard, when 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, within the first 1 / 2 of the Nineteenth century, the requirement of property ownership was abolished. As is necessary, 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 was found accountable for treason in 1844 and sentenced alive imprisonment at hard labor (although he was pardoned the subsequent year.)
After the 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 begin to claim this right. During reconstruction, the idea of a black man voting was intimidating to a lot of in its northern border and the south, and downright blasphemous to some. Many schemes were devised to keep blacks from voting, including poll taxes, literacy tests and cumbersome registration requirements. Blacks, of course, are not the sole once excluded from 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 was required to provide written strategies to a 20 page test including questions such as: "Name the rights one has after he's got been indicted by way of a grand jury." While 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. At that time, blacks slightly outnumbered whites inside the city, however the voter roles were 99% white. Despite their utmost efforts, stiff resistance from your racist and segregationist establishment successfully prevented even a 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 use of the poll tax. Later that year, President Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, eliminating all litera
