VolpeMortenson962
Your Directly to Vote - The
The legal right to vote over these United States is at once both our greatest privilege and our most significant responsibility. For upwards of 220 years brave patriots have shed their blood to aid and defend our democracy. Because of the importance of the upcoming elections, I might hope which everybody that is permitted to vote will do so. Unfortunately, the U.S. has among the lowest voter participation amounts of any democracy in the world. Perhaps a brief search for the long, hard fought struggle toward the universal right to vote provides a bit of incentive making it towards the ballot box the following month.
As a number of my readers may know, once this country was formed, only white male property owners had the legal right to vote. In fact, several colonies even had religious requirements to vote, most of which lasted until 1790! Gradually, within the first 1 / 2 of the 19th century, the advantages of property ownership was abolished. As they are often the case, sometimes these restrictions are 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 the fight for non-property owners 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 proper 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 concept of a black man voting was intimidating to a lot of in the the north as well as 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, of course, weren't the only once excluded from the vote. Many western states denied the legal right to vote to Asian-Americans too.
With the 1950s, many southern states retained poll taxes and literacy tests built to disenfranchise blacks. In Alabama, for example, prospective voters were required to provide written answers to a 20 page test including questions including: "Name the rights one has after he's got been indicted by way of a grand jury." As the Civil Rights Act of 1957 assisted enforcement of voting rights, black voter registration inside the south was only 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. At that time, blacks slightly outnumbered whites within the city, however the voter roles were 99% white. Despite their best efforts, stiff resistance from 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 using the poll tax. Later that year, President Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, eliminating all litera
