15th Amendment

"Section. 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Section. 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

This, finally, gave the right to vote to the African American people in the US. After being no slaves anymore, being accepted citizens they now could finally start to contribute politically to this nation. Nevertheless, it would still take some decades until also black (or any) women could vote. And there are still measurements that can hold especially poor and/or black people back from voting with required IDs for registration to gain more votes for ones party.

"140 years after the 15th Amendment, more progress must be made on voting rights

By David A. Love, March 31, 2010 

It has been 140 years since the 15th Amendment was ratified, but we still have a ways to go to ensure the right to vote.
The 15th Amendment became part of the U.S. Constitution on March 30, 1870. It states: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” And it adds: “The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
With voting rights granted to former slaves, the change to the American political landscape was dramatic. There were more than 1,500 black political officeholders during Reconstruction, all of them Republicans. They included a governor and a lieutenant governor, state legislators and members of Congress and the Senate.
Despite the new voting rights protections guaranteed under the 15th Amendment, there was considerable Southern white resistance to black participation in American civic and political life. Groups such as the Ku Klux Klan were formed to intimidate blacks. And as federal troops left the South and Reconstruction came to a close, the South descended into an era of Jim Crow segregation. States engaged in the wholesale disenfranchisement of blacks, wiping them off the political map.
It was not until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that full citizenship rights would be restored to black people. During the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, dozens of people died securing that right.
And sadly, now, in 2010, remnants of Jim Crow remain.
An estimated 5.3 million Americans are denied the right to vote because of felony convictions, including 4 million who are out of prison. A third of them are black. That means one in eight black men can’t vote.
“As of 2004, more African-American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the 15th Amendment was ratified,” says Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”
Some politicians want to return us to the days of Jim Crow laws. At a Tea Party convention in Nashville, Tenn., in February, former Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo told an audience he lamented that “we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country.” He added, “People who could not even spell the word ‘vote’ or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House.”
Tancredo’s objectionable statement was a not-so-subtle reference to literacy tests, a weapon of choice used by Jim Crow states to disenfranchise black voters.
On the 140th anniversary of the 15th Amendment, Tancredo and others would have us turn back the clock, and return to a time when people of color were denied the right to vote.
Let’s expand democracy rather than shrink it."

Source: http://www.progressive.org/mplovel033110.html

A very brief but totally informing article that depicts the flaws of the 15th amendment and that shows how long a change can take until it becomes reality in the heads of the people. There has always been some scapegoat people needed to blame that bad things that happen on. And to many still which is very sad, that scapegoat is the Black or now the other minorities (legal or illegal) in this country. But this issue is a problem of humankind and exists also in other countries since living together, working with each otehr and accepting each other is hard to do.


I like this video as it shows what others have fought for to show the people today their duty to participate actively in politics. Why should one grouch about the government if one does not even try to change it. There are so many people out there, if they would vote, there might be a different picture and there might be different political decisions right now. In Germany one says that a nonvoter counts automatically as a voter for the brown party as their vote misses to keep them out of perliament. Therefore to me it id a duty to participate in voting, especially if I see what other people have gone through to give this right to their fellow people.