The Voting Rights Act of 1965 free essay sample

The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, granted citizenship to all people â€Å"born or naturalized in the United States,† and includes the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses. This amendment failed to explicitly prohibit vote discrimination on racial grounds Karim 2 In 1870 the 15th Amendment was ratified, which provided specifically that the right to vote shall not be denied or abridged on the basis of race, color or previous condition of servitude. This superseded state laws that had directly prohibited black voting. As a result, in the former Confederate States, where new black citizens in some cases comprised majorities of the eligible voting population, hundreds of thousands -maybe one million recently-freed slaves registered to vote. Black candidates began for the first time to be elected to state, local and federal offices and to play a meaningful role in their governments. The extension of the franchise to black citizens was strongly resisted. Among others, the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camellia, and other terrorist organizations attempted to prevent the 15th Amendment from being enforced by violence and intimidation. Once whites regained control of the state by a process known as Redemption, they used gerrymandering of election districts to further reduce black voting strength and minimize the number of black elected officials. In the 1890s, these states began to amend their constitutions and to ratify a series of laws intended to re-establish and establish white political supremacy. â€Å"Such disfranchising laws included poll taxes, literacy tests, vouchers of good character, and disqualification for crimes of moral turpitude. These laws were color-blind on their face, but were designed to exclude black citizens disproportionately by allowing white election officials to apply the procedures Karim 3 selectively. † (Laney 11) Other laws and practices, such as the white primary, attempted to evade the 15th Amendment by allowing private political parties to conduct elections and establish qualifications for their members. As a result of these efforts, in the former Confederate states nearly all black citizens were disenfranchised and removed by 1910. The process of restoring the rights stolen by these tactics would take many decades. There were several tactics used to steal voting rights away from African Americans. Such of these were payments for poll taxes. Others were Black voters were go to vote and see that their name was erased from the list In every state there were accounts of different tactics to forbid voting. By 1965 rigorous efforts to break the grip of state disfranchisement had been under way for some time, but had achieved only modest success overall and in some areas had proved almost entirely incompetent. The murder of voting-rights activists in Philadelphia, Mississippi, gained national attention, along with numerous other acts of violence and terrorism. Finally, the unprovoked attack on March 7, 1965, by state troopers on peaceful marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, route to the state capitol in Montgomery, persuaded the President and Congress to overcome Southern legislators resistance to effective voting rights legislation. The following year, President Lyndon Baines Johnson attempted to persuade Congress to pass his Voting Rights Act. This proposed legislation removed the right of Karim 4 states to impose restrictions on who could vote in elections. Johnson explained how: Every American citizen must have an equal right to vote. Yet the harsh fact is that in many places in this country men and women are kept from voting simply because they are Negroes. (Lyndon Johnson 1965) President Johnson issued a call for a strong voting rights law and hearings began soon thereafter on the bill that would become the Voting Rights Act. Congress concluded that existing federal anti-discrimination laws were ineffective were not sufficient enough to overcome the resistance to enforce the 15th amendment. Congress had found that case-by-case litigation was inadequate to combat wide-spread and persistent discrimination in voting, because of the inordinate amount of time and energy required to overcome the obstructionist tactics invariably encountered in these lawsuits. After enduring nearly a century of systematic resistance to the Fifteenth Amendment, Congress might well decide to shift the advantage of time and inertia from the perpetrators of the evil to its victims. † (South Carolina v. Katzenbach) President Johnson signed the resulting legislation into law on August 6, 1965 and it outlawed the requirement that voters in the United States take literacy tests to qualify to register to vote, and it provided for federal registration of voters in areas that had less than 50% of eligible minority voters registered. Although opposed by politicians from the Deep South, the Voting Rights Act was passed by large majorities in the House of Representatives (333 to 48) and the Senate (77 to 19). Karim 5 After years of rigorous treatment on African Americans, Civil liberties were all on their side now. Soon after passage of the Voting Rights Act, federal examiners were conducting voter registration, and black voter registration began a sharp increase. Congress had followed through on its job to give African Americans the rights guaranteed to them by the 14th and 15tamendment. Out of the two surveys taken, one in 1965 and one 1988, there showed a dramatic change in the gap between African American voters and white voters. In 1965 there was 50 percent voting rate difference while in 1988there a 6 percent voting rate difference. The long term effect of change had succeeded. Soon after the passing of this landmark act gradual change between black and white voting closed in and there was nearly an equal amount of voters of each race. This landmark act allowed the voices of million of black voters to be heard and was the single most effective bill passed during the civil rights movement and maybe even the entire century. By abolishing literacy tests and poll taxes that prohibited African Americans to vote, America was glued back from its broken pieces of racial hate. It was renewed again in 2006 and left its place in the historical civil rights movement.