Land of the free, home of the brave, country of voter suppression! Not allowing certain groups of people to vote seems almost comically antiquated, but fret not, we are still on that train! With the 2024 presidential election, it seems crucial to dive into the necessities of voting, as well as the history of voting being taken away from people, specifically minorities. While things are not as bad as they used to be, in fact really far from that, there are still patterns of racial discrimination within the voting system.

Here is a little crash course on the landscape of voting after the civil war and during the reconstruction period. Before the civil war, black men in the south were allowed to vote but their vote only counted as three thirds of a vote, and truth be told, they did not have a right to vote, they had the obligation to vote for whoever their enslavers were voting for. This is much more complex and difficult then the long sentence I have just written about it, but we will go off of this information for now. After the civil war, in 1870, black men were finally given the right to vote in the south. While this is in theory nice, as one can expect, it is not actually what happened. Many obstacles were set in place to prevent freed black men from voting, such as literacy tests, poll taxes, and straight up terrorism from the Ku Klux Klan. In fact, during the election of 1870, President Johnson of the democratic party (party of the recently succeeded then returned states), attempted, very lightly, to get the southern states to protect the vote of the newly freed black men. As history shows us, this failed miserably, almost as miserably as reconstruction. Klan attacks were numerous, and people were terrorized, sometimes even killed. This led to a hundred more years of black people fighting their way to equality, especially when it came to voting.

 

Excerpt from the West-Jersey Pioneer, published on October 26th, 1876. Retrieved from the Newspaper archives of the Library of Congress.

 

It is easy to believe, or even expect, that such things would not be happening today. How could our progressed society show signs of such antiquated bigotry. But no, this problem, while manifesting differently, still exists. Latosha Brown, a community organizer, political strategist, and consultant, admitted on NPR to being worried about the way votes were going to be counted due to new rules which might be purposely disenfranchising certain groups. This poses a significant threat to our Democracy. If minorities are having their right to vote purposefully taken away, how can we possibly say we have evolved from the era of the 1870’s?