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Your To Vote - The
The authority to vote over these United states of america reaches once both our greatest privilege and our most important responsibility. For upwards of Two centuries brave patriots have shed their blood to guide and defend our democracy. Because of the importance of the upcoming elections, I'd hope that everyone that is permitted vote is going to do so. Unfortunately, the U.S. has one of many lowest voter participation amounts of any democracy on the planet. Why not a brief exploration of the long, hard fought struggle toward the universal directly to vote will provide a little bit of incentive making it to the ballot box the following month.
As a few of my readers may have heard, once 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, most of which lasted until 1790! Gradually, on the first 1 / 2 of the 19th century, the advantages of property ownership was abolished. As is a fact of life, 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 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 concept of a black man voting was intimidating to numerous in its northern border as well as the south, and downright blasphemous to some. Many schemes were devised to keep blacks from voting, including poll taxes, literacy tests and cumbersome registration requirements. Blacks, of course, were not the only real once excluded from your vote. Many western states denied the authority to vote to Asian-Americans also.
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 answers to a 20 page test including questions for example: "Name the rights a person has after he's been indicted by way of a grand jury." Even though the Civil Rights Act of 1957 assisted enforcement of voting rights, black voter registration within the south was only 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. During those times, blacks slightly outnumbered whites within the city, nevertheless the voter roles were 99% white. Despite their utmost efforts, stiff resistance from your racist and segregationist establishment successfully prevented a single black voter from being included with the rolls.
Dr. King's heroic work, however, stirred the country. 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
