Introduction: Voting Rights

© Herbert Randall. SNCC field secretary and director of the Hattiesburg project Sandy Leigh (r) and 17-year-old local activist and assistant director and youth coordinator of the project Doug Smith (l) explaining voter registration procedures to 103-year-old African-American resident Sylvester Magee on his front porch.

“If you can’t vote, then you’re not free; and if you ain’t free, children, then you’re a slave,” explained Hosea Williams, an aide to Martin Luther King, to a crowd at the Brown Chapel AME Church. One member of the Brown Chapel audience was an 8-year-old girl named Sheyann Webb. After hearing Williams, Webb regularly attended daytime meetings at Brown Chapel. Through her attendance, the young Webb, like many others, learned that the right to vote was vital to their rights as a citizen of the United States. For Black people, voting meant more than casting ballots — voting meant securing political and economic power, civil rights, prison reform, juvenile justice, international human rights and more. In the U.S. South, however, local communities and state governments had created “literacy” tests and other barriers that prevented Black people from exercising their rights to vote as citizens of the United States.

© Matt Heron/Take Stock

The struggle for the right to vote was not limited to African Americans. Literacy tests were part of a long history of the denial of voting rights to citizens of color and women. As Alexander Keyssar notes in The Right to Vote, the United States initially limited the right to vote through property ownership, taxes, registration and residency laws, and tests. Although the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, granted all male U.S. citizens the right to vote regardless of race, it wasn't until the Snyder Act of 1924 that Native Americans could enjoy the rights granted by this amendment. Even then, Native American voting rights were denied across the United States, with many states either refusing to adopt the amendment or using the mechanism of poll taxes and intimidation to keep Native Americans from voting.

Like Native Americans, women did not receive the right to vote with the passage of the 15th Amendment. Black women, in particular, began organizing for the right to participate in public debates and decision making in the 1820s, as documented by Martha S. Jones in Vanguard: How Black women broke barriers, won the vote, and insisted on equality for all. Between 1870 and 1920, women across the United States continued to mobilize and advocate for suffrage. One of the largest marches was at Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration in 1913, when close to 8,000 women and supporters marched along Pennsylvania Avenue demanding voting rights. As they marched, the women faced backlash from onlookers and many were injured. Such efforts led to the passage of the 19th Amendment, which granted the right to vote for women and laid the groundwork, as Lisa Tetrault shows in The Myth of Seneca Falls, for the modern feminist movement.

However, even with the passage of the 19th Amendment, women of color did not achieve their voting rights. The suffrage struggle continued throughout the 20th century, particularly in the period between 1930 and 1970. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Highlander Folk School created citizenship schools in the early 1950s to empower Black residents to register to vote. These early schools resulted in the training of more than 800 people in 11 states in methods to stimulate voter registration. Septima Clark, one of the early Citizenship School teachers, who was known as “Freedom’s Teacher,” used the U.S. Constitution and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights to guide adult students in lessons on literacy and discussions about their rights. Such lessons demonstrate how the schools connected Black citizens’ literacy with their liberation.

The schools also were connected to the efforts of young people who, as Charles Payne shows in his landmark book I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, did the groundwork of walking the back roads of Mississippi and other areas in the South to register local community members. When African Americans attempted to register to vote, they faced intimidation, violence, and even the possibility of losing their jobs. Yet, despite the threats of violence, Black citizens met in churches, planned mass meetings, and marched in the streets to advocate for their citizenship rights. Such well-known moments of the movement – such as the 1965 Selma Marches – were rooted in the earlier efforts of the Dallas County (Alabama) Voters League.

At the forefront of these movements were Black women. As Danielle McGuire shows in At the Dark End of the Street, long before Rosa Parks became “too tired” to get up, she worked to protect Black women against sexual violence in the South. The efforts of students and the courage of local people in the American South pushed the Federal government to pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Even with the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the struggle continued, especially for residents that did not speak English. As Ari Berman explained in his recent book Give Us the Ballot, English-only ballots acted like literacy tests for Latinx voters and new immigrants. This lasted until 1975, when the Latinx community led efforts to amend the Voting Rights Act. Modesto Rodriguez, a farmer from Pearsall Texas, pushed Congress to recognize the country’s “forgotten minority.” In 1975, Congress voted to expand the U.S. Voting Rights Act to require language assistance at polling stations. Native Americans, Asian Americans, Alaska Natives, and Latinx people benefited the most from this provision.

The historical struggle for voting rights not only included direct action, marches, and protests, but also unique forms of education and community organizing. In this section, we provide resources to explore the activities of Citizenship and Freedom Schools in particular. The readings and lesson plans engage students with forms of education for liberation.

Learning the full history of the fight for voting rights is especially important today, in light of the 2013 Shelby v. Holder U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down the 1965 Voting Rights Act provisions requiring certain states to obtain federal preclearance before changing voting laws. Without federal oversight, states across the United States have passed strict voting ID laws, closed voting locations, limited mail-in and early voting, and engaged in other tactics to severely limited the voting rights for citizens of color and economically marginalized communities. In addition, some states have worked very hard to limit the voting rights of people who are incarcerated, or people who were incarcerated for felonies. This chapter will help students to think critically about 21st century events and to continue the fight to ensure that everyone has a say in determining their future and their freedoms.