Voting Rights Act Of 1965

Voting Rights Act of 1965

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 (42 U.S.C.A. § 1973 et seq.) prohibits the states and their political subdivisions from imposing voting qualifications or prerequisites to voting, or standards, practices, or procedures that deny or curtail the right of a U.S. citizen to vote because of race, color, or membership in a language minority group.

After the American Civil War, the 14th and 15th amendments were passed with the idea of protecting the rights of newly freed African American slaves. The fifteenth Amendment ensured that the privilege to vote couldn't be denied to any United States citizen regardless of race and color or previous condition of servitude. The 15th amendment supplemented and followed

in the wake of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, which abolished slavery and ensured citizenship to African Americans. The Voting Rights Act is considered among the best social justice act in U.S. history. It was also a change in the balance of power between the states and the Federal Government Since Reconstruction voter registration had traditionally been managed by state and local authorities. This Act gave the Federal Government the power to manager and register voters.
Although ratified on February 3, 1870, the 15th Amendment was in reality only the beginning of what would be almost a century of struggle for equality before African Americans could begin to fully participate in American public and civic life. After suffering under Jim Crow Laws and struggling for equality. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was intended to change laws that targeted African American minorities so they could not vote, was the first law that successfully protected the right of African Americans to register and vote.
After the Fifteenth Amendment was made into law, southern states discovered ways to pass laws to undermine the African American male’s right to vote. Starting in 1877 the Jim Crow laws were set in effect and in turn took rights away from the African American community. These laws were established to segregate the white and black people in the American South. In theory, the laws were made to make "separate but equal" treatment for both races, however, in reality these laws meant African Americans were subject to lesser quality treatment and facilities than white citizens. Education was segregated as were public facilities such as hotels and restaurants. African Americans were looked at as second class citizens, undeserving of having the same things as white citizens. During the plantation and slave owners era poor white sharecroppers had been convinced they were not at the bottom of the social class system, that there was someone else at the bottom, and that was the African slaves. After Federal laws were enacted to outlaw slavery and give African Americans equal rights racism showed its ugly head. The Jim Crow laws supported the beliefs that whites were better than blacks in all ways. People felt strongly that sexual relations amongst blacks and whites would produce a “mutt” race which they believed would destroy America because regarding blacks as equivalents would support interracial sexual relations. Here are some Jim Crow examples that indicate how strongly people felt that blacks were inferior:
A black male could not offer his hand (to shake hands) with a white male because it implied being socially equal. Obviously, a black male could not offer his hand or any other part of his body to a white woman, because he risked being accused of rape.
Blacks and whites were not supposed to eat together. If they did eat together, whites were to be served first, and some sort of partition was to be placed between them.
Under no circumstance was a black male to offer to light the cigarette of a white female -- that gesture implied intimacy.
Blacks were not allowed to show public affection toward one another in public, especially kissing, because it offended whites.
Jim Crow etiquette prescribed that blacks were introduced to whites, never whites to blacks. For example: "Mr. Peters (the white person), this is Charlie (the black person), that I spoke to you about."
Whites did not use courtesy titles of respect when referring to blacks, for example, Mr., Mrs., Miss., Sir, or Ma'am. Instead, blacks were called by their first names. Blacks had to use courtesy titles when referring to whites, and were not allowed to call them by their first names.
If a black person rode in a car driven by a white person, the black person sat in the back seat, or the back of a truck.
White motorists had the right-of-way at all intersection

The laws set up separate but equal accommodations for everything.

For example there were different bathrooms and drinking fountains for whites and colored people. However, the colored alternative was usually of less quality unlike the premise that everything would be separate but equal. The idea of separate but equal was challenged in the court case Plessy v Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1892) “This 1896 U.S. Supreme Court case upheld the constitutionality of segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine. It stemmed from an 1892 incident in which African-American train passenger Homer Plessy refused to sit in a Jim Crow car, breaking a Louisiana law.” Plessy was brought before Judge John H. Ferguson of the Criminal Court for New Orleans, who upheld the state law. The law was challenged in the Supreme Court on grounds that it conflicted with the 13th and 14th Amendments. The court chose to reject Plessy’s argument that his constitutional rights were violated when they wanted him to sit in a different car on the train, the Court ruled that a state law that “implies merely a legal distinction” between whites and blacks did not conflict with the 13th and14th Amendments. All of the discriminating legislation based on race continued after the decision against Plessy, and was not overturned until Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka 47 U.S. 483 (1954). According to Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, the Court said, by a 7-1 vote, that a state law that “implies merely a legal distinction” between the two races did not conflict with the 13th Amendment forbidding involuntary servitude, nor did it tend to reestablish such a condition. The Court avoided discussion of the protection granted by the clause in the 14th Amendment that forbids the states to make laws depriving citizens of their “privileges or immunities,” but instead cited such laws in other states as a “reasonable” exercise of their authority under the police power. The purpose of the 14th Amendment,

the Court said, was “to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law…. Laws … requiring their separation … do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race.” The argument against segregation laws was false because of the “assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is … solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.”
The lone dissenter, Kentuckian and former slave owner Justice John Marshall Harlan, denied that a legislature could differentiate on the basis of race with regard to civil rights. He wrote: “The white race deems itself to be the dominant race,” but the Constitution recognizes “no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens.” Harlan continued: “Our Constitution is color-blind…. In respect of civil rights all citizens are equal before the law.” The Court’s majority opinion, he pointed out, gave power to the states “to place in a condition of legal inferiority a large body of American citizens.” Following the Plessy decision, restrictive legislation based on race continued and expanded steadily, and its reasoning was not overturned until Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
The U.S. Congress authorized legislation that made it a federal crime to prevent an individual's entitlement to vote and also secured the rights previously promised to ex slaves under both the Fourteenth Amendment and Fifteenth Amendments. During the Reconstruction of 1877 in some states of the old confederacy, African Americans turned into the majority of the voting population, and African Americans ran for office and were chosen at many different levels in the government. “The Republican-controlled state governments in the South were hardly perfect. Many citizens complained about over taxation and outright corruption. But these governments brought about significant improvements in the lives of the former slaves. For the first time, black men and women enjoyed freedom of speech and movement, the right of a fair trial, education for their children, and all the other privileges and protections of American citizenship. But all this changed when Reconstruction ended in 1877 and federal troops withdrew from the old Confederacy.” http://www.crf-usa.org/black-history-month/race-and-voting-in-the-segregated-south.
Once federal troops withdrew and were no longer present to protect the rights of black citizens, white supremacy returned to the old Confederate states. Blacks in large numbers stopped voting because of threats and violence from groups like the Ku Klux Klan, a secret organization whose mission was to preserve white supremacy.
“As a result of intimidati