Persuasive Essay On The Fourteenth Amendment

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All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the States wherein the reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of laws; this brief description is known as the Fourteenth Amendment (Foner A-15). An event that I saw that was fitting to the Fourteenth Amendment was the elimination of black voting. Between the years of 1890 to 1906, the southern states enacted on laws and or the constitutional requirements that were meant to go and eliminate the blacks of any right to vote. During this time the Fifteenth Amendment was given so that no one should be denied the right to vote by the United States or any State on the description of their race, color, or previous circumstance of their servitude. Since Southerners didn’t like these laws and didn’t want to follow them so these Southerner’s were trying to find a way to end black voting. So what they went ahead and did was create what is known as the poll tax. What is the poll tax? You might be wondering. The poll tax is a tax that must be paid in order to be eligible to vote. Why the poll tax was created for was to make it so that people had to pay in order to vote which was disenfranchising to black citizens since this event took place after the Reconstruction. This meant that blacks wouldn’t be able to vote since they couldn’t afford the ballot to vote. With the poll tax being put into place what came along with it was a literacy test and a requirement that... ... middle of paper ... ...s in the political elections. None of what has happened would be explained above if the North and the Supreme Court if they did not team together and give their approval to disenfranchisement laws when these things were in complete violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. The poll tax lived on for couple more decades, until the Twenty-Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was completed in 1964 where it then declared poll taxes unconstitutional in all states. This large disparity between the black voters and white voters in Louisiana, therefore, it had become common to southern states in the 1900’s because of the disabling poll tax. This above event was a complete and total challenge for the black voters of the United States when the Fourteenth Amendment was being challenged by those who didn’t want to follow the rules that were given to them by the Supreme Court.

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