As an ice breaker for the entire class, ask students if they think voting is a right or a privilege for US citizens. What would it mean to citizens if voting is a right? What would it mean to citizens if voting is a privilege? Ask them to consider whether or not they believe people convicted of felonies should be allowed to vote or whether or not the voting age should be lowered to Provide students with the poll tax receipt from Mr.
Carr with these guiding questions:. What information is being collected by the State of Texas on this form? How much did Mr. Carr pay to vote? Have students use the Internet to translate what that would mean in current dollars. What do you know about Mr. Carr from this receipt? He was a year-old African American male railroad worker who lived in the same county and city in Texas his whole life. Provide students with a transcript excerpt from a November 30, oral history with Ellie Dahmer, widow of Vernon Dahmer, and have them watch the video from to Guiding questions:.
When Mrs. Answers might include: At that time in Mississippi, African Americans were intimidated when they tried to vote.
Paying the poll tax at an African American-owned store with an African American store clerk whom they might know would make that step less intimidating. What does Mrs. Dahmer say that shows she and her husband understood the risks of promoting voting among African Americans? She and her husband had been threatened with physical violence for a while and had been preparing themselves should their home be attacked.
Those threats escalated when Mr. Dahmer spoke about the poll tax on the radio. Dahmer shows a copy of the poll tax receipts that she paid for her son Harold and herself on January 25, What is significant about when she paid the tax? What are some reasons she might have saved a copy of these receipts for so many years?
Dahmer paid the poll tax for herself and her son to vote. This appears to have been a very brave act, and the symbol of that act—the poll tax receipts—she may have deemed worthy of keeping.
Provide students with the letter from Mrs. Ciaccio to President Kennedy and the response from Ralph Dungan with these guiding questions:. At what age did Mrs. Ciaccio become eligible to vote? Additional points for research and discussion: When did the minimum voting age change in the US? Vietnam War Why do you think the voting age changed at that time?
Research the history of the 26th Amendment to provide an answer. Does Mrs. Ciaccio call voting a right or a privilege? S he calls it a privilege. She mentions that, as a child, when she saw her parents voting she looked forward to reaching the age when she would have the privilege to vote.
So, she sees voting as a privilege for Americans who reach the current voting age of 21, but she also sees it as an important act that should be free of charge. How much does she say she must pay in order to vote in ?
She says she has not found a satisfactory explanation for the poll tax. What is her response to needing to pay this tax? The ability to vote should not be determined by how much money one has. The "grandfather clause" as well as the other legal barriers to black voter registration worked. Mississippi cut the percentage of black voting-age men registered to vote from over 90 percent during Reconstruction to less than 6 percent in These measures were copied by most of the other states in the South.
By the turn of the century, the white Southern Democratic Party held nearly all elected offices in the former Confederate states. The Southern Republican Party, mostly made up of blacks, barely existed and rarely even ran candidates against the Democrats. As a result, the real political contests took place within the Democratic Party primary elections. Whoever won the Democratic primary was just about guaranteed victory in the general election. In , Mississippi passed a law that declared political parties to be private organizations outside the authority of the 15th Amendment.
This permitted the Mississippi Democratic Party to exclude black citizens from membership and participation in its primaries. The "white primary," which was soon imitated in most other Southern states, effectively prevented the small number of blacks registered to vote from having any say in who got elected to partisan offices--from the local sheriff to the governor and members of Congress. When poll taxes, literacy tests, "grandfather clauses," and "white primaries" did not stop blacks from registering and voting, intimidation often did the job.
An African-American citizen attempting to exercise his right to vote would often be threatened with losing his job. Denial of credit, threats of eviction, and verbal abuse by white voting clerks also prevented black Southerners from voting. When all else failed, mob violence and even lynching kept black people away from the ballot box.
As a result of intimidation, violence, and racial discrimination in state voting laws, a mere 3 percent of voting-age black men and women in the South were registered to vote in In Mississippi, under 1 percent were registered. Most blacks who did vote lived in the larger cities of the South. By not having the power of the ballot, African Americans in the South had little influence in their communities. They did not hold elected offices. They had no say in how much their taxes would be or what laws would be passed.
They had little, if any, control over local police, courts, or public schools. They, in effect, were denied their rights as citizens. Attempts to change this situation were met with animosity and outright violence. But in the s, the civil rights movement developed. Facing enormous hostility, black people in the South organized to demand their rights guaranteed in the U. They launched voter registration drives in many Southern communities.
In the early s, black and white protesters, called Freedom Riders, came from the North to join in demonstrations throughout the South. In some places, crowds attacked them while white police officers looked on. Medgar Evers, the black veteran stopped by a white mob from voting, became a civil rights leader in his native Mississippi. Because of his civil rights activities, he was shot and killed in front of his home by a white segregationist in But through the efforts of local civil rights leaders like Medgar Evers and other Americans, about 43 percent of adult black men and women were registered to vote in the South by That same year, the 24th Amendment was ratified.
It outlawed poll taxes in federal elections. The U. Supreme Court later ruled that all poll taxes are unconstitutional.
White supremacists, however, still fiercely resisted voting by African Americans. Black voter registration in Alabama was only 23 percent, while in neighboring Mississippi less than 7 percent of voting-age blacks were registered.
A major event in the civil rights movement soon brought an end to voting discrimination. Early in , a county sheriff clamped down on a black voter registration campaign in Selma, Alabama. Deputies arrested and jailed protesting black teachers and schoolchildren. African American men were largely barred from voting. Legislation known as Jim Crow laws separated people of color from whites in schools, housing, jobs, and public gathering places.
Denying black men the right to vote through legal maneuvering and violence was a first step in taking away their civil rights. Beginning in the s, southern states enacted literacy tests, poll taxes, elaborate registration systems, and eventually whites-only Democratic Party primaries to exclude black voters. The laws proved very effective. In Mississippi, fewer than 9, of the , voting-age African Americans were registered after In Louisiana, where more than , black voters had been registered in , the number had plummeted to 1, by Insulting racial stereotypes were common in American society.
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