Civil Rights

THE STRUGGLE FOR Civil Rights began when our country began, with the struggle for citizenship rights for African Americans and voting rights for all citizens regardless of gender, economic status, race, or natural origin. States insisted that only white males had the privilege to vote, but ironically, African-American slaves were counted to decide the number of members of congress allocated to states. Many states limited voting to white men who owned property. Thus, only a small percentage of men actually took part in elections.

From 1777–1807, women lost their right to vote in all states. New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New Jersey, which had previously allowed women to vote, rescinded those rights. The 1790 Naturalization Law stated that only free, white immigrants could become naturalized citizens. Because white was defined as pure European ancestry, this prevented immigrants from other countries, or immigrants of mixed ancestry, from becoming naturalized citizens. Under the myth that Native Americans were citizens of their sovereign Indian nations, meaning reservations, they could not become citizens of the United States, and could not vote. For nearly 70 years, there were struggles and movements in various states to remove the property restrictions on the right to vote.

The first African slaves were brought to North America in 1619, a year before the arrival of the Mayflower. Resistance began immediately, with intermittent slave uprisings, and many escapes. Often, the escaped slaves joined Native American tribes, who fought to defend their tribal homeland against white encroachment and the expansion of the slave system.

Political opposition to slavery among whites in the northern states did not begin to coalesce until the early 1820s, with the founding of the American Anti-Slave Society in 1833. It was a broad political movement involving both African Americans and whites committed to ending slavery openly in the northern states, and clandestinely in the south.

This abolition movement grew in size and intensity and was met with increasingly violent opposition from slaveholders and slave states. Abolitionists were arrested, beaten, and murdered, in addition to having homes burned and printing presses destroyed. Within the abolition movement, there were bitter disagreements regarding the future of freed slaves. Some favored full citizenship, including the right to vote, while others advocated some form of second-class citizenship without voting rights. Many wanted to expel freed slaves and send them back to Africa, although the vast majority of slaves had been born in America. In opposition to [Page 120]the Anti-Slave Society, 20,000 slaves were sent to Africa where they carved out a portion of Liberia.

March on Washington: The Civil Rights march on Washington, D.C., in 1963 helped lead to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, guaranteeing basic civil rights for all Americans.

Civil rights violations also occurred against Mexican Americans. After revolting from Mexico in 1836, the independent Republic of Texas denied citizenship and the right to own property to anyone who had not supported the revolution. All Hispanics were assumed to be a part of this category, even those who had fought for the revolution. When Texas was admitted to the Union as a slave state in 1845, the Mexicans remaining in Texas were granted U.S. citizenship and property rights by the federal government, in theory. But Mexican Americans who tried to vote independently faced widespread beatings, burnings, and lynchings, except in cases where large landowners forced their employees to vote as a group under supervision to ensure that they all voted for the owner's preferred candidates. With the ending of the Civil War, the methods used in Texas and other southern states to deny voting rights to African Americans were also applied to Mexican Americans.

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