WolfMcinturff781
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Your To Vote - A Brief History
The legal right to vote over these United states of america reaches once both our greatest privilege and our most significant responsibility. For more than 200 years brave patriots have shed their blood to aid and defend our democracy. Given the significance of the upcoming elections, I might hope that everyone that is permitted vote will do so. Unfortunately, the U.S. has one of the lowest voter participation levels of any democracy on the planet. What about a brief search for the long, hard fought struggle toward the universal directly to vote will provide a bit of incentive making it towards the ballot box the following month.
As a few of my readers may know, when this country was formed, only white male property owners had the authority to vote. Actually, several colonies even had religious requirements to vote, many of which lasted until 1790! Gradually, over the first 50 % of the 19th century, the requirement of property ownership was abolished. As is necessary, sometimes these restrictions weren't 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 proprietors 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 start to claim this right. During reconstruction, the thought of a black man voting was intimidating to numerous both in north of manchester and the south, and downright blasphemous with a. Many schemes were devised to help keep blacks from voting, including poll taxes, literacy tests and cumbersome registration requirements. Blacks, of course, were not the sole once excluded in the vote. Many western states denied the right to vote to Asian-Americans too.
Through 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 strategies to a 20 page test including questions such as: "Name the rights one has after he has been indicted with a grand jury." While the Civil Rights Act of 1957 assisted enforcement of voting rights, black voter registration within 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. At that time, blacks slightly outnumbered whites within the city, nevertheless the voter roles were 99% white. Despite their utmost efforts, stiff resistance in the racist and segregationist establishment successfully prevented 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 usage of the poll tax. Later that year, President Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, eliminating all litera
