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Civil Rights Act of 1866

March 25, 1965

Grandfather Clauses- 1896

Louisiana passes "grandfather clauses" to keep former slaves and their descendants from voting. As a result, registered black voters drops from 44.8% in 1896 to 4.0% four years later. Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama and Virginia follow Louisiana's lead by enacting their own grandfather clauses.

On this date, the House overrode President Andrew Johnson’s veto of the Civil Rights Bill of 1866 with near unanimous Republican support, 122 to 41, marking the first time Congress legislated upon civil rights. The bill mandated that "all persons born in the United States," with the exception of American Indians, were "hereby declared to be citizens of the United States." The legislation granted all citizens the “full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property.”

In early 1965, Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) made Selma, Alabama, the focus of its efforts to register black voters in the South. That March, protesters attempting to march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery were met with violent resistance by state and local authorities. The historic march, and King’s participation in it, greatly helped raise awareness of the difficulty faced by black voters in the South.

Video: http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/civil-rights-movement/videos/freedom-march

1860

1896

1990

Voting Rights Act of 1965

February 26, 1869

1972-Barbara Jordan and Andrew Young

Congress passes the Fifteenth Amendment and ratified it February 3, 1870. This Amendment gave African American men the right to vote. Despite the amendment, by the late 1870s, various discriminatory practices were used to prevent African Americans from exercising their right to vote, especially in the South.

Video: http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/civil-rights-movement/videos/speeches-african-americans-vote-in-south-carolina

President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act into law, permanently barring barriers to political participation by racial and ethnic minorities, prohibiting any election practice that denies the right to vote on account of race, and requiring jurisdictions with a history of discrimination in voting to get federal approval for changes in their election laws before they can take effect.

It had been in the late 1880s since African-Americans had last served in the U.S. House of Representatives from the South. But that changed on Nov. 7, 1972, when Andrew Young was elected to represent a congressional district in Georgia and Barbara Jordan was elected to Congress by voters in Texas. Both Jordan and Young had distinguished histories in their respective states. Young was widely known as a lieutenant to Martin Luther King Jr. and a prominent player in the civil rights movement. Jordan had been a member of the Texas State Senate, representing portions of Houston. She was the first African-American elected to the Texas Senate since Reconstruction and became the first Black woman elected to Congress from the South.

Sources

  • http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/reconstruction/activism/ps_1866.html
  • http://massvote.org/voterinfo/history-of-voting-rights/
  • http://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/government-and-civics/essays/winning-vote-history-voting-rights
  • https://www.history.org/Foundation/journal/Spring07/elections.cfm

1956

By the end of 1965, 250,000 new black voters are registered, one third of them by federal examiners.

1982

President Ronald Reagan signed a 25-year extension of the Voting Rights Act.

1990

Due, in part, to the enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, the number of black elected officials in Georgia grows to 495 in 1990 from just three prior to the VRA.

History of Voting in the U.S.

1970

1940-Jim Crow Laws in the South

Only 3% of eligible African Americans in the South are registered to vote. Jim Crow laws like literacy tests and poll taxes were meant to keep African Americans from voting. After the end of the Civil War, would-be black voters in the South faced an array of disproportionate barriers to enfranchisement. The literacy test, supposedly applicable to both white and black prospective voters who couldn't prove a certain level of education but in actuality disproportionately

administered to black voters, was a classic example

of one of these barriers.

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