Voting Rights Act Of 1965

Voting Rights Act of 1965

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 (42 U.S.C.A. § 1973 et seq.) prohibits the states and their political subdivisions from imposing voting qualifications or prerequisites to voting, or standards, practices, or procedures that deny or curtail the right of a U.S. citizen to vote because of race, color, or membership in a language minority group.

After the American Civil War, the 14th and 15th amendments were passed with the idea of protecting the rights of newly freed African American slaves. The fifteenth Amendment ensured that the privilege to vote couldn't be denied to any United States citizen regardless of race and color or previous condition of servitude. The 15th amendment supplemented and followed

For example there were different bathrooms and drinking fountains for whites and colored people. However, the colored alternative was usually of less quality unlike the premise that everything would be separate but equal. The idea of separate but equal was challenged in the court case Plessy v Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1892) “This 1896 U.S. Supreme Court case upheld the constitutionality of segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine. It stemmed from an 1892 incident in which African-American train passenger Homer Plessy refused to sit in a Jim Crow car, breaking a Louisiana law.” Plessy was brought before Judge John H. Ferguson of the Criminal Court for New Orleans, who upheld the state law. The law was challenged in the Supreme Court on grounds that it conflicted with the 13th and 14th Amendments. The court chose to reject Plessy’s argument that his constitutional rights were violated when they wanted him to sit in a different car on the train, the Court ruled that a state law that “implies merely a legal distinction” between whites and blacks did not conflict with the 13th and14th Amendments. All of the discriminating legislation based on race continued after the decision against Plessy, and was not overturned until Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka 47 U.S. 483 (1954). According to Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, the Court said, by a 7-1 vote, that a state law that “implies merely a legal distinction” between the two races did not conflict with the 13th Amendment forbidding involuntary servitude, nor did it tend to reestablish such a condition. The Court avoided discussion of the protection granted by the clause in the 14th Amendment that forbids the states to make laws depriving citizens of their “privileges or immunities,” but instead cited such laws in other states as a “reasonable” exercise of their authority under the police power. The purpose of the 14th Amendment,