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Your Directly to Vote - A Brief History
The authority to vote in these United states of america reaches once both our greatest privilege and our most important responsibility. For over 220 years brave patriots have shed their blood to guide and defend our democracy. Given the significance of the upcoming elections, I might hope which everybody who is permitted to vote can do so. Unfortunately, the U.S. has one of many lowest voter participation degrees of any democracy on the planet. Perhaps a brief investigation of the long, hard fought struggle toward the universal right to vote provides some incentive to make it to the ballot box the following month.
As a few of my readers may have heard, if this country was formed, only white male homeowners had the legal right to vote. In reality, several colonies even had religious requirements to vote, some of which lasted until 1790! Gradually, over the first half of the 1800s, the necessity for property ownership was abolished. Out of the box a fact of life, sometimes these restrictions were not 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 keepers to obtain suffrage, Thomas Dorr was found guilty of 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 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 start to claim this right. During reconstruction, the thought of a black man voting was intimidating to numerous in the the north as well as 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, obviously, weren't the sole once excluded from the vote. Many western states denied the right to vote to Asian-Americans too.
From the 1950s, many southern states retained poll taxes and literacy tests built to disenfranchise blacks. In Alabama, for instance, prospective voters were required to provide written solutions to a 20 page test including questions such as: "Name the rights a person has after he's been indicted by 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. In those days, blacks slightly outnumbered whites inside the city, nevertheless the voter roles were 99% white. Despite their finest efforts, stiff resistance from your racist and segregationist establishment successfully prevented a single black voter from being added to 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
