- Robinson, George M. Fredrickson Edgar E. (1995). Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0195109788.
Lyndon Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965
Black suffrage in the United States refers to voting in elections in the United States by blacks. It has a checkered history, with many advances and setbacks. Prior to the Civil War and the Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution some blacks in the United States were given the right to vote, however this right was often abridged, or taken away. After 1870 blacks were theoretically equal before the law, but the period of time between the end of Reconstruction era and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 showed that racial equality has been inconsistent in American life.
Background
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1876 cartoon illustrating opposition to black suffrage
At the founding of the country, blacks were not given citizenship, nor the right to vote. Early legal acts, like the Naturalization Act of 1790 granted naturalized citizenship to "free white person[s] ... of good character," thus excluding slaves, free blacks , Native Americans, indentured servants, and Asians. However states were allowed to grant voting rights at the state level. Prior to the Civil War, free Negroes had suffrage in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. However, the right to vote was rescinded in New Jersey (1807) and Pennsylvania (1838). During this time, Abolitionists sought an end to slavery, and many demanded further rights such as suffrage. The 1857 Dred Scott case held that persons of black descent were not U.S. citizens.
After the Civil War, Reconstruction Era laws favored black suffrage, but in practice, blacks still faced obstacles to voting. Some of the "Black Codes" passed shortly after the legal abolition of slavery explicitly prevented blacks from voting. The Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, adopted in 1870, stipulated: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." The Enforcement Acts increased federal penalties for voter intimidation, particularly by white terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.
Blacks seeking suffrage were often met with violence and disenfranchisement. The 1873 Colfax massacre occurred when White locals fought with blacks and federal troops over black voting in Grant Parish, Louisiana. In United States v. Cruikshank (1876), the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated some of the Enforcement Acts, ruling that the federal government could only intervene to prevent discrimination by state actors. In United States v. Reese (1876), the Court upheld voting requirements such as literacy tests which do not explicitly discriminate on the basis of race. Jim Crow laws enforcing legal racial segregation at the state and local level in the Southern United States. were enacted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by white Democratic-dominated state legislatures to disenfranchise and remove political and economic gains made by blacks during the Reconstruction Era.
Blacks continuously worked towards overcoming these barriers. A group of black activists formed the Niagara Movement in 1905, rebuking the Atlanta compromise and issuing a declaration which demanded universal manhood suffrage. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People formed in 1910 and pursued voting rights mostly through litigation. In Guinn v. United States (1915), the Supreme Court struck down a grandfather clause which functionally exempted only White people from literacy tests. The Court ruled against white primaries in Nixon v. Herndon (1927) and Nixon v. Condon (1932), upheld white primaries in Grovey v. Townsend (1935) and finally banned them with Smith v. Allwright (1944) and Terry v. Adams (1953). In Breedlove v. Suttles (1937), The Court upheld the constitutionality of a poll tax requirement for voting.
The Civil Rights Movement brought renewed attention to black voting rights. Florida voting rights activists Harriette Moore and Harry T. Moore were assassinated by the KKK in 1951. In 1960, Gomillion v. Lightfoot the Supreme Court struck down a plan to redraw district lines of Tuskegee, Alabama, on the grounds that it would disenfranchise black voters. The Twenty-fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, passed in 1962–1964, banned poll taxes as a precondition for voting in federal elections. The Supreme Court ruled against state poll taxes in 1966 in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections. Civil rights leaders began organized campaigns to register Black voters, including the federally endorsed Voter Education Project. A particularly intense voting rights struggle in Mississippi led to the death of Medgar Evers in 1963 and the Freedom Summer campaign in 1964. Organizers also created the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to challenge the white-dominated Mississippi Democratic Party. In Alabama, the highly publicized Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965 met with a violent response, bringing more scrutiny to suppression of Black voters. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibited a range of discriminatory state voting practices. The Supreme Court upheld this law in the 1966 decision South Carolina v. Katzenbach.
Since the 1960s, the practice of gerrymandering and the creation of "majority minority" districts have sometimes been identified as threats to black voting rights in the U.S. The Supreme Court limits the Gomillion decision in Mobile v. Bolden (1980), distinguishing between racist effects and racist intent, and prohibiting only the latter. The Court ruled in Shaw v. Reno (1993) that if a redistricting plan is "so bizarre on its face that it is 'unexplainable on grounds other than race'", it must be held to a "strict scrutiny" standard under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court has since struck down redistricting plans for racial gerrymandering in Miller v. Johnson (1995), Bush v. Vera (1996), and several more cases.. The Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), holding that the racist practices which necessitated the law in 1965 no longer present a problem in 2013.
The film American Blackout alleges that disenfranchisement of black voters in Georgia led to the defeat of Cynthia McKinney in DeKalb County's 2002 Democratic primary.
