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Your Right to Vote - A Brief History
The legal right to vote in these United States are at once both our greatest privilege and our most critical responsibility. For over 220 years brave patriots have shed their blood to guide and defend our democracy. Due to the importance of the upcoming elections, I would hope which everybody that is permitted to vote is going to do so. Unfortunately, the U.S. has among the lowest voter participation degrees of any democracy in the world. Perhaps a brief exploration of the long, hard fought struggle toward the universal right to vote will provide a bit of incentive to really make it for the ballot box later.
As a few of my readers may know, once this country was formed, only white male homeowners had the authority to vote. In reality, several colonies even had religious requirements to vote, most of which lasted until 1790! Gradually, within the first half of the 1800s, the necessity for property ownership was abolished. Out of the box often the case, sometimes these restrictions weren't lifted without a 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 proprietors to obtain suffrage, Thomas Dorr was found guilty of treason in 1844 and sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor (although he was pardoned the following 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 numerous in north of manchester and 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, are not the only once excluded in the vote. Many western states denied the authority to vote to Asian-Americans as well.
With the 1950s, many southern states retained poll taxes and literacy tests designed to disenfranchise blacks. In Alabama, for instance, prospective voters were required to provide written answers to a 20 page test including questions such as: "Name the rights an individual has after he has been indicted by way of a grand jury." As the Civil Rights Act of 1957 assisted enforcement of voting rights, black voter registration in the south only agreed to be increased by about 200,000, a mere fraction of 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 in the city, nevertheless the voter roles were 99% white. Despite their finest efforts, stiff resistance in the racist and segregationist establishment successfully prevented a good 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 using the poll tax. Later that year, President Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, eliminating all litera
