Timeline: Voting Rights and Civil Rights
Timeline: Voting Rights and Civil Rights 35
Topic One
Foundations of Our Democracy--18th century
1776--The Declaration of Independence is signed in 1776. Who could vote? Not all citizens can vote.
Abigail Addams, a future first lady, asked the continental Congress to support women’s rights.
1777-1821--Women are still not able to vote, and free men of color lose their right to vote in all states.
Topic Two
The Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and Significant Constitutional Amendments
1863--The 13th Amendment ends slavery
1867--The 14th Amendment granted citizenship but not the right to vote to all native-born Americans.
1868--Women petition that women’s right to vote be included in the 15th Amendment.
1869--Congress passed the 15th Amendment giving only African American men the right to vote.
1890--Formal literacy tests for voter eligibility are first introduced.
1896--Louisiana passes "grandfather clauses" to keep former slaves and their descendants from voting. As a result, registered black voters dropped from 44.8% in 1896 to 4.0% later. Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama, and Virginia follow Louisiana’s led by enacting their own grandfather clauses.
1920--Congress passed the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote.
1940--Only 3% of eligible African Americans in the South are registered to vote. Jim Crow laws like literacy tests and poll taxes were meant to keep African Americans from voting.
May 17, 1954--Supreme Court outlawed school segregation in Brown vs. Board of Education
June 14, 1955--Emmett Till is murdered while visiting family in Money, Mississippi. The 14-year-old Emmett Till, an African American from Chicago, was brutally murdered for allegedly flirting with a white woman four days earlier.
December 1, 1955--Rosa Parks’ arrest resulted in lawsuits and appeals leading to the Supreme Court ruling that bus segregation was unconstitutional. Rosa Parks became known as “the mother of the civil rights movement.”
Topic Three
Civil Rights, Equal Rights, 1960s
June 12, 1963--Medgar Evers, civil rights leader, was assassinated in Jackson, Mississippi.
August 28, 1963--25,000 Americans march on Washington for civil rights.
July 2, 1964--Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson signs Civil Right Act of 1964.
1964--Poll taxes are outlawed with the adoption of the 24th Amendment.
February 26, 1965--Jimmie Lee Jackson, civil rights marcher, was killed by a state trooper in Marion, Alabama.
March 7, 1965--State troopers beat back marchers at Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma, Alabama.
March 25, 1965--More than 500 non-violent civil rights marchers are attacked by law enforcement officers while attempting to march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama to demand the need for African American voting rights.
July 9, 1965--Voting Rights Act of 1965 is signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, aimed to overcome legal barriers at the state and local levels that prevented African Americans from exercising their right to vote as guaranteed under the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
1965--By the end of 1965, 250,000 new black voters are registered, one third of them by federal examiners.
1970--President Richard Nixon signed an extension of the Voting Rights Act.
1971--26th Amendment enlarged the electorate by 27 million voters by granting the right of 18-21-year-olds the right to vote.
1972--Barbara Jordan of Houston and Andrew Young of Atlanta become the first African Americans elected to Congress from the South since Reconstruction.
1975--Presidents Gerald Ford signed an extension of the Voting Rights Act.
1982--President Ronald Reagan signed a 25-year extension of the Voting Right Act.
1990--Due in part to the enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, the number of black elected officials in Georgia grows to 495 in 1990 from just three prior to the Voting Rights Act.
Topic Four
Voter Suppression, Voter Disenfranchisement
2002--Trying to solve election inconsistency with more federal voting standards Help America Vote Act (HAVA) passed in response to disputed 2000 presidential election. Massive voting reform effort requires states comply with federal mandate for provisional ballots, disability access, centralized, computerized voting lists, electronic voting and requirement that first-time voters present identification before voting.
2006--Congress extended Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act for an additional 25 years.
2011--Restrictions to voting passed in South Carolina, Texas, Florida are found to disproportionately impact minority voters.
2010 to Present--Since 2010, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has had 18 Section 5 objections to voting laws in Texas, South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana.
2011--Florida passed a law that restricts voter registration and made cuts to early voting.
2011--Texas passed one of the nation’s most restrictive voter ID laws. The court blocked the law, citing racial impact and suppression.
2011--South Carolina passed a restrictive voter ID law that would keep more than 180,000 African Americans from casting a ballot.
2013--Shelby County v. Holder crippled one of the most effective protections for the right to vote by rendering ineffective that certain jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination get pre-approval for voting changes. States wasted no time enacting potentially discriminatory laws including Texas, Mississippi, North Carolina, Florida, Virginia, South Dakota, Iowa, and Indiana.
Topic Five
Call to Action -Civic Duty and Community Participation
1976--The League of Women Voters sponsored the first televised presidential debates since 1960 for which they won an Emmy award for Outstanding Achievement in Broadcast Journalism.
1982--The LWV was in the forefront of the struggle to pass the Voting Rights Act Amendments of 1982.
1990--The LWV grassroots campaign finally secured House passage of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), known as “motor-voter.”
1993--President Clinton signed the National Voter Registration Act. Clinton saluted the League as “freedom fighters” in the continuing effort to expand American democracy. The “motor-voter” bill enabled thousands of citizens to apply to register at motor vehicle agencies automatically, as well as by mail and at public and private agencies that service the public.
2002--The League was instrumental in the enactment of the Help America Vote Act of 2002 and the Bipartisan Finance Reform Act of 2002.
2011--The League launched, “Power the Vote,” a campaign opposing measures to restrict access to voting that particularly affected minorities, elderly, students and rural voters and helped bring cases to court.
2014--The League adopted the study of the Structures of Democracy to review money in politics, redistricting, and the Constitutional Amendment process.
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