JenBeals88
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Your Directly to Vote - The
The legal right to vote during these Usa are at once both our greatest privilege and our most important responsibility. For over Two centuries brave patriots have shed their blood to aid and defend our democracy. Because of the significance of the upcoming elections, I might hope that everyone that is eligible to vote is going to do so. Unfortunately, the U.S. has among the lowest voter participation levels of any democracy on earth. Why not a brief investigation of the long, hard fought struggle toward the universal to vote will provide some incentive to really make it to the ballot box next month.
As some of my readers may have heard, when this country was formed, only white male property owners had the authority to vote. In reality, several colonies even had religious requirements to vote, most of which lasted until 1790! Gradually, on the first 50 % of the Nineteenth century, the necessity for property ownership was abolished. As is often the case, sometimes these restrictions were not lifted with no fight. In 1842, the Dorr war was fought in Rhode Island over this very issue. For his troubles in leading the battle for non-property keepers to obtain suffrage, Thomas Dorr is discovered responsible for treason in 1844 and sentenced your 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 idea of a black man voting was intimidating to many in north of manchester and also the south, and downright blasphemous for some. Many schemes were devised to maintain blacks from voting, including poll taxes, literacy tests and cumbersome registration requirements. Blacks, needless to say, weren't the sole once excluded from the vote. Many western states denied the legal right to vote to Asian-Americans as well.
With the 1950s, many southern states retained poll taxes and literacy tests built to disenfranchise blacks. In Alabama, for instance, prospective voters was required to provide written solutions to a 20 page test including questions for example: "Name the rights one has after he's got been indicted with a grand jury." As the Civil Rights Act of 1957 assisted enforcement of voting rights, black voter registration within the south was just increased by around 200,000, just fraction of 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, but the voter roles were 99% white. Despite their best efforts, stiff resistance from your racist and segregationist establishment successfully prevented even a single black voter from being added to the rolls.
Dr. King's heroic work, however, stirred the country. On January 23, 1965, the 24th Amendment was passed banning using the poll tax. Later that year, President Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, eliminating all litera
