Why did it take 95 years for full civil rights and voting rights?

African Americans secured the right to vote in 1870 with the ratification of the 15th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the third of what is known as the Civil War or Reconstruction Amendments. Yet despite the 15th Amendment’s clear language prohibiting discrimination in the vote “on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude,” 95 years would pass before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 gave African Americans the right to vote in a meaningful way.

The battle to ensure that the language of the 15th Amendment was not just empty sentiment began well before the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a pivotal event in American history. However, the success of the march inspired civil rights leaders to pursue a meaningful right to vote for African Americans—and other rights long denied—with renewed vigor. Their determined campaign resulted in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, seminal pieces of legislation that transformed American democracy (National Commission on the Voting Rights Act 2006, 2).

This paper discusses the struggle to achieve voting rights in the decades before and after the 1963 March on Washington and the present day uncertainty over retaining the rights that have transformed American democracy given the recent Supreme Court nullification of Section 5, one of the most important provisions of the Voting Rights Act (Hill 2013).

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