Did you know that National Voter Registration Day is September 17th?
In the United States, voting is both a privilege & a right. So much has happened in the 250 years that this country has existed to make sure that our voices & our right to vote remain intact. The Founding Fathers fought an entire revolution against England to make sure we had legal representation in our government & wrote the Declaration of Independence along the way. In 1791 (a full 16 years after the Declaration of Independence went out), the Bill of Rights was ratified. Granted, in those days, the right to vote only belonged to white, landowning men but it was the first step towards representing the people as a whole & toward voting equality.
One of the outcomes of the American Civil War was the Fifteenth Amendment. It was ratified in 1870 & explicitly states that no government (city, state, or federal) can deny or abridge a person's right to vote based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Unfortunately, the United States did see a rise in Jim Crow during this era & this included finding ways to make voting difficult based on a person's race.
Additionally, there were still no amendments to the Constitution granting women the right to vote. Women like Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Alice Paul, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, & Susan B. Anthony made speeches & marched in parades in an attempt to convince the men in power at the time that "women, like men, deserved all of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship." Finally in 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment was passed & women were also granted the right to vote. Again, it is explicitly stated that no government can deny or abridge a person's right to vote based on gender.
While women were gaining the right to vote, people of color in the United States were suffering from the effects of Jim Crow. In 1954, communities started organizing to campaign against the legal segregation, racism, & disenfranchisement happening in the US. Like the suffragettes, the Civil Rights Movement had their leaders like Bayard Rustin, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, & John Lewis marching, making speeches, & sometimes quite literally fighting to bring attention to the hardships & lack of equity, lack of equality, experienced by people of color. In July of 1964, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law. The Civil Rights Act prohibits the unequal application of voter registration requirements (essentially, if you are someone who is able to vote in the United States, YOU ARE ABLE TO VOTE), prohibits racial segregation, & prohibits employment discrimination.
The website for National Voter Registration Day has links to help you register to vote & resources to look at, if you are interested in learning more: National Voter Registration Day
The Illinois State Board of Elections also has information to help you to register to vote, as well as checking on whether you are registered to vote in Illinois: Voter Registration (il.gov)
The library, of course, has a display up for National Voter Registration Day. Come in & check it out! And while you are here, we are more than willing to help you find books on anything mentioned within this blog post. :)
If you are able to, go vote! It is your right, it is your responsibility, & it is your privilege. Too much has happened in the last the last two centuries to not use that ability.