In 1965, Congress passed the Voting rights act, making southern blacks be able to vote. Literacy tests, poll taxes, and other such requirements were now pronounced illegal.…
The opposition will propose that these laws restricted the black vote to insignificance. Although that may be true, it was the public opinion which pushed the lawmakers in that direction. As document 14.2 states, the white southerners want “to make it clear that the white south ‘does not desire or intend to ever include black men among its citizens’”. This set of laws was just an extension of the will of the people in those states who believed in white supremacy, and those laws were only followed because the people enforcing them believed they were…
citizen of any color to vote. After Reconstruction, the New South,” enacted literacy tests, poll taxes, elaborate registration systems, and eventually whites-only Democratic Party primaries to exclude black voters(Document L). In addition, a poll tax receipt from Louisiana 1918 required voters to pay an expensive tax of $1.00 to vote (Document K). During the time the $1.00 tax made voting a luxury because it was an exorbitant price. This resulted in millions of blacks being unfairly rejected from the voting process which was a violation of their voting rights. Literacy tests also prevented black voting since there would be a change in difficulty based on your race. A drastic decrease in black voters was a result of these laws which countered the 15th amendment. The opposite side may claim that the poll tax applied to blacks and whites. However, the grandfather clause says that taxes and tests don’t apply to men who have had a father vote, which allowed whites to vote for free while blacks never voted before. These obstacles diminished the effect of the 15th Amendment and continuous efforts were made to cripple the rights of African…
According to the law, everyone is entitled to vote, to be specific, the age of 18 and above. I believe felons should be allowed to vote because people make mistakes. There are many people who want to live right, they can’t because they are being kept down, the situation they’re in leads them to be in a bad place. For example, if a person commits theft, it’s most likely they’re poor. He/she steals because they are desperate for what they don’t have; basic needs or necessities of life. I believe felons should be allowed to vote, even if they are criminals, they deserve a second chance, it is not fair to take away their right to vote. This is as if like taking away their freedom of speech. Everyone has a voice and it should stand out, even if…
There are many reasons that the African American community was scared to register to vote on their own for example African Americans would receive threats by the whites and or KKK if they did and some of those threats were carried out in the form of car and house bombings, beaten to death or near death, hangings and many other forms of violence. Another reason why the African Americans in the South, especially in the state of Mississippi did not register to vote on their own was because they simply did not know how to read/understand how to register themselves. This caught the attention of many people up in the northern states of the country and it made the organizations SNCC, COFO, NAACP, and SCLC wanted to get involved and better the South but their main focus was the state of Mississippi, which was the most prominent at putting down the African American community.…
Fifteenth amendment prohibits denying men the rights to vote based on their race. Men have been discouraged about not being able to vote or to have other opportunities.Me as the leader in our community, I think if we want to improve the condition of our African American life we would have to not give up and keep trying, lose some pride that we may have, and also let no one tell you what you are capable or what you’re not. Working together we could all make a difference and change anything, so our future would be better.…
The fight against discrimination is crucial and African-Americans have been in this important fight for years. Even today, we see the struggle of discrimination all throughout the United States, which is why many people successfully convinced the government to create this process called affirmative action, and what this did was allow for an effort to improve the employment or educational opportunities of minorities. Today, there are many cases on education and employment that were won and lost simply because of affirmative action was on or against their side.…
Second, and closely related, was the issue of whether the roughly four million freedmen should be allowed to vote. The issue was how to receive the four million former slaves as citizens. If they were to be fully counted as citizens, some sort of representation for apportionment of seats in Congress had to be determined. Before the war, the population of slaves had been counted as three-fifths of a corresponding number of free whites. By having four million freedmen counted as full citizens, the South would gain additional seats in Congress. If blacks were denied the vote and the right to hold office, then only whites would represent them. Many conservatives, including most white southerners, northern Democrats, and some northern Republicans, opposed black voting. Some northern states that had referenda on the subject limited the ability of their own small populations of blacks to vote.…
In the article Takoma Park 16-year-old savors his history making moment at the polls by Annys Shin it talks about the proposal of letting 16 year olds to vote. I believe they shouldn't be allowed to vote. They shouldn't be allowed simply because most 16 year olds do not really care about politics, nothing motivates them to vote and even 18 year olds have low voter turnouts. The 16 year olds I know do not care about politics that much either.…
believe that we should keep foreign aid because you should think of all of those starving people in Africa everyday. Put yourself in their shoes, and see how it feels to go some days starving having no feed. Another reason for keeping foreign aid is because gto make myself a better person. My last reason for keeping foreign aid is because when we help the African people get jobs, they will pay us back.…
Asian Pacific Islander Americans have long since been considered to be minorities in America, and as such, we are, at times, underrepresented in American politics and so forth. This being said, that doesn’t mean that we should allow ourselves to be underrepresented in this prospect. In order for us, as a group, to overcome this, we should be voting and participating more when it comes to politics and civic engagements. Even though we are called a minority, that doesn’t mean that we are small in number or insignificant. We should begin involving ourselves more in politics and taking part in more civic engagements so that we can improve our lives.…
When it comes to disenfranchisement is the media giving us the whole story? Do they tell us the stories that will stir people up or stories of both sides? Let’s talk about the big thing in America here recently, African Americans and cops. When it comes to the media do they try to stir us up more and get us going for one side more than the other? Do they tell the whole story they report or just what gets people’s attention? To those who believe it is all one sides fault, let us take a look at the whole situation.…
This essay discusses my reflection on whether or not felons should have the right to vote. A felon is defined as a person who has been convicted of a felony, which is a crime punishable by death or a term in state or federal prison. A felony is a serious crime usually punishable by imprisonment or death. Convicted felons should not be allowed to vote. Many Americans were not allowed to vote these past elections. It wasn’t because they didn’t pay taxes or were mentally incompetent or underage. The reason why they can’t vote is because they are convicted felons. Once someone has committed a serious crime or felony, they have shown that they are not trustworthy enough to vote. Because they disobeyed the law, they should not have the obligation to vote. If one is sent to prison, they have agreed that most of their rights have been taken. Prison is meant to be a punishment and one of their punishments is their loss of freedom and democratic rights for their time of their sentence. Convicted felons have also demonstrated poor judgment and should not be trusted with a vote. The main point of a prison sentence to show the offender and society that criminal behavior results in loss of freedom and most of the rights that freedom has to offer. Therefore felons should not be allowed to vote. Although some people believe that felons should be allowed to vote at any circumstance but I believe that if they are felons they have already lost that opportunity because they have decided to make the choice to participate in criminal activities. If the felon is not willing to follow the law himself, then they should not demand the right to vote. In California, felons serving time in prison or county jail are denied their right to vote. According to The Sentencing Project, 5.3 million Americans were unable to vote in 2008 due to a felony conviction. Unfortunately, statistics show that this number is expected to rise to 6 million.…
A lot has happened over the past few months. You absolutely would not believe what happened today. You remember me telling you about that negro, James Meredith, who was trying to get admitted into the University of Mississippi around the end of May of last year? Well, rather than letting it go and forgetting about it like he should have, he decided to get the NAACP involved. Apparently they appealed his case all the way up to the Supreme Court and they ruled that the University had no choice but to allow him to enroll here as a student. We thought that was the end of it and we would be forced to go to school with a negro. However, the Governor of this great state of Mississippi, Ross Barnett, tried to block him by having the Legislature pass a law that prohibited any person who was convicted of a state crime from admission to a state school. This law applied to Meredith because he had been convicted of false voter registration.…
With the declaration of segregation being unconstitutional in schools, the acceptance of African Americans as an equal citizen became much more widespread, especially in politics. In the mid-1900s, around 1960, African Americans were either excluded or discouraged from voting, in fact only about 10-30% of African Americans voted in most states. By 1970 and the late 1980s, about 50-70% of African Americans voted in the United States (Document E).…