Black Suffrage

The struggle of blacks for full voting rights in the United States is almost as old as the country itself. For the most part, the struggle ended in 1965 with passage of the historic voting rights act. Yet there are still instances where impediments are placed in the way of African Americans' right to vote.

In the early days of the Republic, voting was restricted to adult white males, but only about half of them were eligible to vote. States required ownership of property or payment of taxes, which excluded poor white men. Slaves, Indians, and women could not vote. By the early twentieth century, most of the ineligible groups had broken down their barriers to the franchise. But voting discrimination against African Americans was the last to be rectified. (See direct election; women's suffrage.)

The U.S. Constitution sanctioned slavery. The constitutional provision that declared a black person to be three-fifths a person for census considerations was the ugly codification of what many early Americans considered blacks to be: property. In Scott v. Sandford (1857), popularly [Page 29]known as the Dred Scott Case, the Supreme Court confirmed this notion, holding that slaves were property, not included under the word citizen in the Constitution, and therefore unable to claim any of the rights and privileges of many white Americans.

Although a tiny fraction of free blacks in the northern states had some voting rights at the beginning of the nineteenth century, they were the exception. In 1861, when the Civil War broke out, twenty-seven of the thirty-three states prohibited blacks from voting. Before World War II began in the 1940s for the United States, only about 150,000 blacks in the South, or about 3 percent of the estimated population of 5 million blacks of voting age in that region, were registered to vote.

Slavery and the Civil War