FROM THE MAYFLOWER TO THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT: A BRIEF HISTORY OF VOTING IN AMERICA
Voting has been an integral part of being an American citizen but it has been a constant struggle for many groups to be able to cast their vote. From 1620 to the Civil Rights Movement, Americans had to struggle through an uphill battle to participate in democracy.
From the moment that the Mayflower landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620, voting has come with exceptions. Starting in 1654, African children were forced to identify themselves with Black, which excluded them from being considered a member of White society and having any voting rights. Even still, the Black community persisted and the first Black politician, named Wentworth Cheswell, was elected to office in 1768. That next year the three-fifths compromise was made at the Constitutional Convention. This critical distinction between a whole person and less than a whole person continues to define America’s struggle with egalitarianism.
Sadly it was not until the north won the civil war, that Black Americans were seen as a whole person under the law. It took 100 years, from the time of the ⅗ compromise, for all the former confederate states to be instructed to put Black people’s right to vote into their own constitutions. But, like everything else during reconstruction, there was no way to enforce the rules, and Black men did not officially get the right to vote until the passage of the 15th amendment in 1870.
During reconstruction, hope for the protection of every American’s voting right seemed more possible with the passage of the Enforcement Act. This act, passed in 1871, added criminal pensions for interfering with a Black man’s right to vote. However, in this forward progress was short-lived. The idea that someone can be ⅗ of a person continued to affect how many Americans saw their country and in turn affected the country’s systems. After the Supreme Court’s ruling in 1873 that the fourteenth amendment, which protects all citizens equal protection under the law, does not extend to individual acts of discrimination, reconstruction was effectively over.
Then, came Jim Crow, and race-based discrimination was introduced under a different name. The increasingly popular message that the country is better divided than together forced irreparable barriers between minority and White communities. During the height of Jim Crow, the foundation was laid that would become the basis of discrimination in the 21st century. Slowly but surely, the rights of the minority community were taken away. It was not long before voter suppression became a normalized and widespread practice.
The Grandfather Clause, which said a man could only vote if his grandfather had voted in 1867, eliminated a majority of the Black voters. Additionally, impossible literacy tests forced people at the polls to answer rigged tests and even determine how many marbles were in the jar just to vote. Literacy tests, the Grandfather Clause, and poll taxes among other things, resulted in the number of registered Black voters in Louisiana dropping below 6,000 in 1900. To make matters worse, race riots broke out in New York and New Orleans and the Supreme Court’s ruling in Giles v Harris gave to Alabama. The ability to take away voting rights for a lifetime if a certain voting registration deadline is missed. The case failed to recognize the reality of the situation, as Blacks and even poor Whites were being turned away by Whites when they tried to register, on time, in person. As the passage of Jim Crow laws continued with President Woodrow Wilson in office, protest and violence increased.
The number of race riots increased across the country, ultimately destroying hundreds of Black communities. In an effort to combat vote suppression, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) was founded to fight different forms of voter suppression. In 1942, the Anti-Poll Tax bill fell in the US Senate, despite the support from LDF, which was run by Thurgood Marshall. It took years of legal persistence by the NAACP and other activist groups, and victories in equality cases such as Brown v. The Board of Education, to shine some hope on making voting accessible to all Americans.
In the next few years, voting rights become an important issue. President John F. Kennedy’s former Attorney General, Robert Kennedy, created VEP, The Voter Education Project. Three years later, in 1964, the Civil Rights Act is passed, making discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, and later sexual orientation and gender identity illegal.
In the next year, the NAACP continued to fight for complete voter protection under the law. After Bloody Sunday, the voting rights movement continued to gain support from all different types of people. Then, finally, after hundreds of years of protesting and determination, the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965.