A nation of the people, by the people, and for the people was a radical concept in 1776, when our founders began to fight for our freedom and independence.
The Constitution, though written to organize a government run by her country’s citizens, did not specify who could vote. That decision was left to the individual states, which have used that power since to both suppress some voters as well as to enlarge their electorate and enfranchise those who had formerly been denied voting rights.
In our nation’s earliest years only wealthy Protestant white men were allowed to vote, meaning fewer than half of the nation’s residents were able to influence their own governance. The electorate was enlarged to include more white men when laws were changed regarding property requirements early in the 19th Century, which ultimately led to the election of more populist candidates and to the Abolitionist Movement.
It wasn’t until 1868, after the Civil War and the end of slavery, that the federal government took up the issue of voting and passed the 14th Amendment, granting ‘citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States’. (Evidently ‘persons’ did not include women.) A year later the 15th Amendment was passed, giving ‘all citizens the right to vote regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude’.
While this granted men of color the right to vote, in the following years the KKK was established with the intention of suppressing the black vote by means of terror, murder and threat. While a few African Americans were elected to public office despite the terror tactics used against them, before men of color were able to use their voting power to create broad change, most southern states held Constitutional Conventions as a means of enacting laws to suppress black voters. They established poll taxes and required complicated, sometimes illogical, tests which were called literacy tests, but were frequently complex word puzzles that few voters of any color would pass, to prevent black men from registering to vote. Despite outnumbering white Americans in many southern states, African Americans were systematically denied access to the voting booth.
The Abolitionist Movement of the early 19th Century led to call for Universal Suffrage. In 1832 the first woman to speak publicly about politics, an African American woman named Maria Stewart, called for the vote for women, but there was not an organized national movement until the Seneca Falls Convention, held in 1848.
For the next seventy-two years women organized, spoke out, rallied, wrote, marched, protested and agitated for the vote. Many were beaten and incarcerated for legally protesting. Those who were jailed often held hunger strikes and were then brutally restrained and force fed, with tubes forcibly inserted down their throats.
With the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, all women were ostensibly given the right to vote, but, like their male counterparts, until 1965 women of Asian, Latin American and African heritage were successfully blocked from voting by poll taxes and other impediments.
Though the 14th Amendment granted men of color and former slaves the right to vote, it did not extend to Native Americans. They were not considered citizens of the US, but citizens of their tribes. The movement for voting rights was complex and controversial within the Native American Community, because there was a concern that tribes and reservations would lose their sovereign status and their connection to their past and culture would be further eroded. After many native people left their reservations in order to work and thousands voluntarily joined the military to fight side by side with white Americans in WWI, the right of citizenship was extended to Native Americans born in the US after 1924. It was not until 1962, however, before the last state changed its laws to enable Native Americans to vote.
African Americans and other minorities were jailed and subjected to various forms of violence, including torture, murder and incarceration, for working for Civil Rights during the 20th Century. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, outlawing poll taxes and other unfair burdens on voters, our country came closer to the lofty goal of universal suffrage.
Incarceration can also affect voting rights. In sixteen states and the District of Columbia felons lose their right to vote while incarcerated; in twenty-one states, including West Virginia, voting rights are lost to felons during their period of incarceration and while released on probation or parole and voters must re-register; and in eleven states felons lose their right to vote indefinitely, unless they are pardoned or go through other lengthy processes. Because people of color are far more likely than their white counterparts to be incarcerated for the same offenses, many critics feel that voting rights are disproportionately limited among non white groups in the US through incarceration.
Our country has yet to reach the lofty goal of 100 percent safe voter registration and participation and efforts are still made in some states to limit the right to vote to this day. The voting rights of all citizens need to be protected. When ‘We, the people’ do not vote, our system fails and the lofty dreams of our country’s founders wither.
Whether you were born white or a person of color, rich or poor, male or female or other, blood was shed for your right to vote.
Please cherish it and use it.
