The Roanoke Electoral Board is working to allow the city to opt out from some provisions of a landmark civil rights law. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 -- signed into law 45 years ago Friday -- was put in place to outlaw discriminatory electoral practices such as poll taxes and literacy tests that prevented blacks and other minorities from voting.
During the 1960s, many brave men and women fought against bigotry and injustice to secure this most basic right for all Americans. Enacted in 1965, the Voting Rights Act (VRA), the "crown jewel" of our civil rights statutes, was born out of their courage, struggle and sacrifice. It provided protection to minority communities, and prohibited any voting practice that would abridge the right to vote on the basis of race. Any "test or device" for registering or voting was forbidden, thereby abolishing poll taxes and literacy tests. Section five of the VRA addresses "pre-clearance" and is only applicable in certain parts of the country. State and local political jurisdictions with a documented history of discrimination must submit any proposed changes to their voting laws to the U.S. attorne...
Nineteenth-century African American female activists, including Sojourner Truth, Mary Church Terrell and Anna Julia Cooper, agitated for the inclusion of African American women's suffrage, to no avail. [...] later, when women earned the right to vote in 1920 with the passage of the 19th Amendment, large numbers of African American women remained restricted through literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and allWhite primaries. According to data from the Center for American Women and Politics, 230 African American women serve in state legislatures out of 1,799 women currently serving in statehouses.
Such was my reaction when a senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Major Owens (D.-N.Y.), took to the House floor to make the case for extending the Voting Rights Act. When lawmakers sing its praises, they usually cite the need to end "persistent and purposeful discrimination through literacy tests, poll taxes, intimidation, threats and violence" and emphasize that "the right to vote is the foundation of our democracy.
We must not forget that it has not even been a decade since the 2000 Florida voting scandal, where AfricanAmericans and poor people were disenfranchised. Four years later, in Ohio, there was a similar debacle. In both instances, voters lost faith in the system and George W. Bush was victorious. In 2006, before renewing the act, Congress held 22 hearings and determined there was enough evidence to support extending the law. The Voting Rights Act was passed to counter, and put an end to, state level practices, like poll taxes and literacy tests, used to prevent Blacks from voting. While those specific barriers may no longer exist, voter discrimination and intimidation do.
I read the "Guns and cities and the Supremes" opinion in the Whittier Daily News from the Kansas City Star. The writer, like all gun-control advocates, plays a semantic shell game. The 2nd Amendment says, "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." You cannot change the meaning of words in the middle of a document. You cannot define "the people" one way in the 1st Amendment and differently in the 2nd. Projecting the 2nd Amendment definition of "the people" forward to the 1st, only the militia has a right to free speech. Does the writer truly believe that? Either we, as the people of the 1st Amendment, have a right to both free speech and to bear arms, or we have neither. Federal law su...
Black voters in Mississippi and elsewhere owe a huge debt to the late Fannie Lou Hamer. She is remembered for her saying, "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired." At age 44 in 1962, she was surprised to learn that black Missippians had a constitutional right to vote. Most had been prevented from doing so by fear, intimidation, poll taxes, literacy tests and other barriers. When she began to register people to vote, she was savagely beaten, but she kept on. She became field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She later co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party that in 1964 challenged the all- white Mississippi delegation to the Democratic National Convention. The powers that be did not want to seat them, but after her speech, two delegates of the M...
We see this as the historical launching of something that should have happened a long time ago," [Charles Barron] said during a City Hall press briefing on Tuesday, March 14th. "We're very excited and very optimistic that this will pass. Immigrants were able to vote in the United States during the first 150 years of the country's existence. Ron Hayduk, a member of CUNY's Professional Staff Congress, said that the end of immigrant voting rights - which came in the early twentieth century - was similar to the use of literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses and residency requirements once used to deprive African Americans of the right to vote. Those who wanted to disenfranchise the numerous Irish and Italian immigrants coming to U.S. shores at that time were afraid of them and afr...
Southern politicians are howling about the recent renewal of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. They say the ugly era of poll taxes and literacy tests is over in the South, that the South may not have "risen again," but it has risen above the voting abuses of its past. Southern politicians must not read the newspaper. Shenanigans in the South still abound. Witness the hanky-panky of Tom Delay in his redistricting of Texas, or that uncomfortable moment in the last presidential election when the most complicated ballots in the nation -- the notorious "butterfly ballots" -- were purposely given to the least educated citizens in the nation. The number of badly cast butterfly ballots might have changed history.
... poor white) population through the use of poll taxes and literacy tests (Key 1949; Kousser 1974) ...
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