BobbiGrajeda752
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Your Right to Vote - The
The right to vote in these United states of america is at once both our greatest privilege and our most significant responsibility. For over 200 years brave patriots have shed their blood to guide and defend our democracy. Because of the need for the upcoming elections, I would hope that everybody that is permitted vote is going to do so. Unfortunately, the U.S. has one of many lowest voter participation degrees of any democracy on earth. Perhaps a brief search for the long, hard fought struggle toward the universal right to vote will give you some incentive to really make it towards the ballot box the following month.
As a few of my readers may have heard, once this country was formed, only white male homeowners had the authority to vote. In fact, several colonies even had religious requirements to vote, many of which lasted until 1790! Gradually, on the first half of the Nineteenth century, the necessity for property ownership was abolished. Out of the box a fact of life, sometimes these restrictions weren't 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 keepers to obtain suffrage, Thomas Dorr was found guilty of treason in 1844 and sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor (although he was pardoned the subsequent 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 many both in 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, of course, weren't the sole once excluded in the vote. Many western states denied the authority to vote to Asian-Americans also.
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 strategies to a 20 page test including questions including: "Name the rights a person 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 in the south was just 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. In those days, blacks slightly outnumbered whites inside the city, but the voter roles were 99% white. Despite their best efforts, stiff resistance from the 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 nation. 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
