VOTING RIGHTS

Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Era

While the 15th Amendment barred voting rights discrimination on the basis of race, it left the door open for states to determine the specific qualifications for suffrage. Southern state legislatures used such qualifications—including literacy tests, poll taxes and other discriminatory practices—to disenfranchise a majority of Black voters in the decades following reconstruction. 

As a result, white-dominated state legislatures consolidated control and effectively reestablished the Black codes in the form of so-called Jim Crow laws, a system of segregation

that would remain in place for nearly a century. In the 1950s and ‘60s, securing voting rights for African Americans in the South became a central focus of the civil rights movement. While the sweeping Civil Rights Act of 1964 finally banned segregation in schools and other public places, it did little to remedy the problem of discrimination in voting rights. The brutal attacks by state and local law enforcement on hundreds of peaceful marchers led by Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights activists in Selma, Alabama in March 1965 drew unprecedented attention to the movement for voting rights.

Later that year, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act, which banned literacy tests and other methods used to disenfranchise Black voters. In 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections that poll taxes (which the 24th Amendment had eliminated for federal elections in 1964) were unconstitutional for state and local elections as well. President Lyndon B. Johnson celebrates with Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, and Clarence Mitchell after signing the Voting Rights bill into law on August 6, 1965. Before passage of the Voting Rights Act, an estimated 23 percent of eligible Black voters were registered nationwide; by 1969 that number rose to 61 percent. By 1980, the percentage of the adult Black population on Southern voter rolls surpassed that in the rest of the country, the historian James C. Cobb wrote in 2015, adding that by the mid-1980s there were more Black people in public office in the South than in the  rest of the nation combined. 

In 2012, turnout of Black voters exceeded that of white voters for the first time in history, as 66.6 percent of eligible Black voters turned out to help reelect Barack Obama, the nation’s first African American president.  In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, ruling 5-4 in Shelby. Holder that it was unconstitutional to require states with a history of voter discrimination to seek federal approval before changing their election laws. In the wake of the Court’s decision, a number of states passed new restrictions on voting, including limiting early voting and requiring voters to show photo ID. Supporters argue such measures are designed to prevent voter fraud, while critics say they—like poll taxes and literacy tests before them—disproportionately affect poor, elderly, Black and Latino votes.

NMZ TAMPA IS AN OFFICIAL VOTING SITE! Join us August 26th at 2511 East Columbus Drive Tampa, FL 33605

(Source: Internet)