KetchumMartinson442
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Your Directly to Vote - The
The legal right to vote in these United States reaches once both our greatest privilege and our most critical responsibility. For more than 200 years brave patriots have shed their blood to guide and defend our democracy. Due to the significance of the upcoming elections, I might hope which everybody who is permitted vote will do so. Unfortunately, the U.S. has one of the lowest voter participation degrees of any democracy in the world. What about a brief search for the long, hard fought struggle toward the universal right to vote will give you a little bit of incentive to really make it towards the ballot box later.
As some of my readers may have heard, when this country was formed, only white male home owners had the legal right to vote. In fact, several colonies even had religious requirements to vote, some of which lasted until 1790! Gradually, over the first half of the 1800s, the requirement of property ownership was abolished. Out of the box often the case, 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 the fight for non-property owners to obtain suffrage, Thomas Dorr is discovered responsible for treason in 1844 and sentenced alive imprisonment at hard labor (although he was pardoned the next year.)
After 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 begin to claim this right. During reconstruction, the idea of a black man voting was intimidating to a lot of in the its northern border as well as the south, and downright blasphemous to some. Many schemes were devised to help keep blacks from voting, including poll taxes, literacy tests and cumbersome registration requirements. Blacks, obviously, were not the sole once excluded from 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 made to disenfranchise blacks. In Alabama, for instance, prospective voters was required to provide written solutions 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 inside the south only agreed to be increased by about 200,000, just fraction with 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, but 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 usage of the poll tax. Later that year, President Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, eliminating all litera
