When Were African Americans Able to Vote Again

In the immediate backwash of the Ceremonious War, the United States found itself in uncharted territory. With the Confederacy's defeat, some iv million enslaved Black men, women and children had been granted their liberty, an emancipation that would be formalized with passage of the 13th Subpoena to the Constitution.

For Blackness Americans, gaining the full rights of citizenship—and especially the right to vote—was key to securing true freedom and cocky-determination. "Slavery is non abolished until the Blackness man has the ballot," Frederick Douglass famously said in May 1865, a month afterward the Spousal relationship victory at Appomattox.

Presidential Reconstruction & Blackness Codes

A 1867 political cartoon depicting an African American man casting his ballot during the Georgetown elections every bit Andrew Johnson and others look on angrily.

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Afterward Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865, the job of reconstructing the Wedlock fell to his successor, Andrew Johnson. A North Carolina-born Unionist, Johnson believed strongly in country's rights, and showed great leniency toward white Southerners in his Reconstruction policy. He required the erstwhile Confederate states to ratify the 13th Amendment and pledge loyalty to the Union, but otherwise granted them gratuitous rein in reestablishing their mail service-war governments.

Every bit a consequence, in 1865-66, most Southern state legislatures enacted restrictive laws known as Black codes, which strictly governed Black citizens' behaviors and denied them suffrage and other rights.

Radical Republicans in Congress were outraged, arguing that the Blackness codes went a long manner toward reestablishing slavery in all but proper noun. Early on in 1866, Congress passed the Civil Rights Beak, which aimed to build on the 13th Amendment and requite Black Americans the rights of citizens. When Johnson vetoed the nib, on the basis of opposing federal activeness on behalf of formerly enslaved people, Congress overrode his veto, marker the beginning time in the nation's history that major legislation became law over a presidential veto.

The 14th & 15th Amendments

With passage of a new Reconstruction Act (once more over Johnson's veto) in March 1867, the era of Radical, or Congressional, Reconstruction, began. Over the next decade, Blackness Americans voted in huge numbers across the South, electing a total of 22 Black men to serve in the U.S. Congress (2 in the Senate) and helping to elect Johnson'south Republican successor, Ulysses S. Grant, in 1868.

The 14th Amendment, approved by Congress in 1866 and ratified in 1868, granted citizenship to all persons "born or naturalized in the United States," including old slaves, and guaranteed "equal protection of the laws" to all citizens. In 1870, Congress passed the last of the three and then-called Reconstruction Amendments, the 15th Amendment, which stated that voting rights could non exist "denied or abridged by the United states or by whatsoever state on business relationship of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

Reconstruction saw biracial democracy exist in the South for the commencement time, though much of the power in state governments remained in white hands. Like Black voters, Black officials faced the constant threat of intimidation and violence, often at the easily of the Ku Klux Klan or other white supremacist groups.

Coil to Go on

READ MORE: How the 1876 Election Effectively Ended Reconstruction

Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Era

While the 15th Amendment barred voting rights discrimination on the ground of race, it left the door open for states to determine the specific qualifications for suffrage. Southern state legislatures used such qualifications—including literacy tests, poll taxes and other discriminatory practices—to disenfranchise a majority of Blackness voters in the decades following Reconstruction.

Equally a consequence, white-dominated land legislatures consolidated control and effectively reestablished the Black codes in the form of and so-chosen Jim Crow laws, a organization of segregation that would remain in place for nearly a century.

In the 1950s and '60s, securing voting rights for African Americans in the South became a central focus of the civil rights move. While the sweeping Civil Rights Act of 1964 finally banned segregation in schools and other public places, it did picayune to remedy the problem of discrimination in voting rights.

The barbarous attacks past state and local police enforcement on hundreds of peaceful marchers led past Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights activists in Selma, Alabama in March 1965 drew unprecedented attending to the motility for voting rights. Subsequently that year, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act, which banned literacy tests and other methods used to disenfranchise Black voters. In 1966, the U.S. Supreme Courtroom ruled in Harper v. Virginia Lath of Elections that poll taxes (which the 24th Amendment had eliminated for federal elections in 1964) were unconstitutional for state and local elections equally well.

Connected Challenges to Blackness Voting Rights

President Lyndon B. Johnson celebrates with Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, and Clarence Mitchell after signing the Voting Rights bill into police force on Baronial 6, 1965.

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Before passage of the Voting Rights Act, an estimated 23 percent of eligible Blackness voters were registered nationwide; by 1969 that number rose to 61 percent. By 1980, the percent of the adult Black population on Southern voter rolls surpassed that in the balance of the land, the historian James C. Cobb wrote in 2015, adding that by the mid-1980s in that location were more than Blackness people in public office in the Due south than in the rest of the nation combined.

In 2012, turnout of Black voters exceeded that of white voters for the offset time in history, as 66.six percent of eligible Blackness voters turned out to help reelect Barack Obama, the nation's start African American president.

In 2013, the Supreme Courtroom struck downwardly a cardinal provision of the Voting Rights Act, ruling 5-iv in Shelby five. Holder that it was unconstitutional to require states with a history of voter discrimination to seek federal blessing before changing their election laws. In the wake of the Court'due south decision, a number of states passed new restrictions on voting, including limiting early voting and requiring voters to prove photo ID. Supporters fence such measures are designed to forbid voter fraud, while critics say they—like poll taxes and literacy tests before them—disproportionately impact poor, elderly, Black and Latino voters.

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Source: https://www.history.com/news/african-american-voting-right-15th-amendment

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