One of the most important issues that marked the past week in America was the debate on voting rights. Election laws enacted in some states are described as restricting the right to vote. The country is witnessing similar debates during the 100-year suffrage struggle that took place after the civil war that ended in 1865. Last week’s events also showed that the struggle for the right to vote has not actually ended.
“Democracy is under threat, the attack on democracy is a fact…” Americans heard these statements a lot in the third week of January, moreover, from top figures.
The reason for this is the recent adoption of laws that restrict voting rights in nearly 20 states in the country.
Suffrage debates in America have been on the agenda for almost 100 years after the end of the civil war in 1865.
The Civil War officially ended slavery, but the struggle for complete freedom for blacks dragged on for years, and suffrage played an important role in that struggle. After the defeat of the pro-slavery Confederation in the Civil War, 4 million black women, men and children were liberated, but what kind of freedom was this?
Frederick Douglass, who came from slavery and became a prominent activist for the abolition of slavery, said in May 1865, just a month after the Confederacy’s defeat, that “slavery was not abolished until blacks voted.”
After President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, the task of rebuilding the union was left to the next president, Andrew Johnson. Johnson showed broad tolerance for restructuring to the southern states.
As a result, in 1865-66, many southern states enacted laws known as the Black Codes, which ignored the voting and other rights of black citizens.
Thereupon, Congress took action and passed the Civil Rights Act in 1866, overwhelmingly bypassing President Johnson’s veto. The goal was to grant citizenship rights to black Americans.
In 1867, new steps were taken with the Reconstruction Act. Over the next 10 years, black Americans voted with high turnout in the southern regions. With the law enacted in 1868, those born in America were given citizenship rights, including former slaves, and equality before the law was ensured. In 1870, Congress recognized that the right to vote could not be revoked on the basis of race, color, or prior circumstances. So, have these laws passed? Not much can be said for the Southern states. Most of the power in the administration of the states was still in the hands of the whites. Like black voters, black officials often faced a policy of violence and intimidation by the racist Ku Klux Klan or other white supremacist groups.
While Article 15, passed by Congress, outlawed voting discrimination based on race, it left it to the states to determine the qualifications required to vote.
Southern states also enacted a series of practices such as literacy tests and voting taxes to prevent blacks from voting.
As a result, white-dominated state legislatures emerged, which reintroduced the Black Codes through what became known as Jim Crow laws.
The Jim Crow laws, which President Joe Biden referred to in his speech in Atlanta, went down in history as a discriminatory system that remained in effect for almost 100 years.
In the 1950s and 60s, the effort to guarantee the voting rights of African Americans became the focus of the civil rights movement. While the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination in schools and other public places, it did not make significant progress in ending discrimination in voting. In March 1965, violent intervention in the march in Selma, Alabama, led by civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr., sparked an unexpected increase in voting rights.
That year, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. With this law, practices aimed at deterring black voters from the ballot box were removed. In 1966, the Constitutional Court ruled that the voting tax was unconstitutional.
African American turnout has increased over the years, and in 2012 black American voters broke a record turnout of 66.6 percent, enabling the country’s first black President, Barack Obama, to be re-elected.
At the point reached after long struggles, the laws enacted by some states in the last period reminds of the old period. It is stated that the restrictions on early voting and postal voting target black voters. The requirement to show an identity card is one of the controversial laws that came into force.
To get an ID card, it is necessary to go to an official office and issue a birth certificate, which means you need to take time off from work; It is emphasized that the target of this is black voters.
In this year’s midterm elections in America, the entire House of Representatives, a portion of the Senate and some states will vote for the governors.
If the Democrats do not take steps in this regard, they will not smile in the elections, and according to some, history will not remember those who do not take a step regarding their voting rights.