Texas Voting Rights

923 Words4 Pages

Joshua Herron
Government/Period 6
Mr. Hunt
10/18/15
Media Report The Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbade the use of any voter registration or literacy requirement in an unfair or discriminatory manner. Texas ID Law Called Breach of Voting Rights Act by Erik Eckholm states that Texas has a strict voter identification law which blacks and Latinos find discriminating and claims it violates the Voting Rights Act is 1965. This case is being closely watched in legal circles after a 2013 Supreme Court decision that blocked the voting act’s strongest enforcement tool, federal oversight of election laws. Texas is one of the states that are being watched, due to its history of racial discrimination. The Texas ID law is one of the strongest laws in the …show more content…

Abraham Lincoln was the first president who mentioned African American voting. In 1865, Lincoln said that freed slaves who were intelligent or who had served as a soldier should be allowed to vote. The Fourteenth Amendment passed in 1868 guaranteed this right as part of the full citizenship accorded to African American men. Voting remained a contentious issue; the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote but the racial divide remained. Voting rights became a central issue in the Civil Rights Movement. In 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. lead a march from Selma to Montgomery for better voting laws. Less than five months later, Lynden Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which made limiting the vote on the basis of race, color and language illegal. In sections four and five of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 included special provisions to ensure fair voting practices in a number of states, most of them in the South. Voting rights advocates say some citizens there continue to be disenfranchised, but the Supreme Courts close ruling in 2013, striking down section four, suggests conditions have changed since 1965. It is left to Congress to reconsider the

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