DV - From Reconstruction to Date Flashcards
22 August, 1964: Lou Hamer and Ella Baker
led a delegation of activists at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Atlantic City. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP, April 1964) protested Mississippi’s all-white delegation at the DNC.
22 August, 1964: Lou Hamer and Ella Baker
led a delegation of activists at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Atlantic City. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP, April 1964) protested Mississippi’s all-white delegation at the DNC.
“What we casually call the right to vote is actually a franchise, a privilege, that the state can choose to confer or withhold.”
T. L. Banks
The nineteenth amendment is technically not a right:
Minor v. Happersett (1875)
*Found the right to vote was not included in the rights and immunities of federal citizens.
Virginia Minor challenged a St. Louis registrar’s decision to block her from registering to vote. A pioneer of the New Departure, Minor argued that women were United States citizens and that voting was a “privilege” of national citizenship protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court rejected Minor’s claim. In a unanimous decision, the Court agreed that women were U.S. citizens, but ruled that voting was not a right of national citizenship. Instead, the Court concluded that the Constitution left the question of women’s suffrage to the states.
Pope v. Williams
Held that nothing in the federal constitution confers the privilege to vote
“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.”
15th amendment
“The true reason of requiring any qualification, with regard to property, in voters, is to exclude such persons as are in so mean a situation that they are esteemed to have no will of their own. If these person had votes, they would be tempted to dispose of them under some undue influence or another.”
Jurist William Blackstone (1723-1780), during popular struggles to expand suffrage
“[I]f the courts can consider any question settled, this is one. For nearly ninety years the people have acted upon the idea that the Constitution, when it conferred citizenship, did not necessarily confer the right of suffrage. . . . Our province is to decide what the law is, not to declare what it should be.”
Chief Justice Morrison Waite (Majority)
“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”
Text of the 19th amendment. Implies any right to vote is conferred by the state and not the federal constitution. Prohibits states from disqualifying someone to vote on the basis of sex.
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 to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
14th Amendment, one of the Reconstruction Amendments.
1868
Following the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, suffragists began to argue that this transformational amendment granted women the right to vote. This movement was known as the “New Departure.” From 1868 to 1875, hundreds of women—both African American and white—embraced this movement. Some women successfully voted, while most were turned away, arrested, or fined.
The “New Departure”
the political strategy used by the Democratic Party in the United States after 1865 to distance itself from its pro-slavery and Copperhead history in an effort to broaden its political base, and focus on issues where it had more of an advantage, especially economic issues. The New Departure theory also espoused that the Fourteenth Amendment and the Fifteenth Amendment had already given women suffrage, but that argument was met with defeat in state and federal courts
The Democratic Party was the principal party in power in the southern United States, before and during the Civil War (1861–1865) and had supported secessionism, slavery and the Confederate States of America. An even greater liability was the accusation repeated by Republicans that most Democrats had been defeatists during the war and supported Copperhead efforts to lose the war. The Republicans, who claimed to have fought and won the war, saving the Union and abolishing slavery, had the advantage. Radical Republicans hostile to the white South took control of Congress in 1866, stripped ex-Confederates of their power in local affairs, and used the Army to support Republican Parties across the South during Reconstruction. Democrats opposed Radical Reconstruction, but were ineffective.[2]
The “New Departure” was strongly opposed by large factions of Democrats in the Deep South, who professed loyalty to the Confederate legacy. Republicans attacked the Democrats as being insincere about reform, committed to states’ rights at the expense of national unity and to white supremacy at the expense of civil rights
“The women’s rights movement, throughout history, defined its priorities with reference to white middle- or upper-class women. Thus ‘discrimination that affected all women’ included the right of owning property but not [B]lack women’s voting rights.”
Ronnie L Podolefsky, The Illusion of Suffrage: Female Voting Rights and the Women’s Poll Tax Repeal Movement After the Nineteenth Amendment
franchise
c. 1300, fraunchise, “a special right or privilege (by grant of a sovereign or government);” also “national sovereignty; nobility of character, generosity; the king’s authority; the collective rights claimed by a people or town or religious institution,” also used of the state of Adam and Eve before the Fall, from Old French franchise “freedom, exemption; right, privilege” (12c.), from variant stem of franc “free” (see frank (adj.)).
From late 14c. as “freedom; not being in servitude; social status of a freeman;” early 15c. as “citizenship, membership in a community or town; membership in a craft or guild.” The “special right” sense narrowed 18c. to “particular legal privilege,” then “right to vote” (1790). From mid-15c. as “right to buy or sell,” also “right to exclude others from buying or selling, a monopoly;” meaning “authorization by a company to sell its products or services” is from 1959.
“The true reason of requiring any qualification, with regard to property, in voters, is to exclude such persons as are in so mean a situation that they are esteemed to have no will of their own. If these person had votes, they would be tempted to dispose of them under some undue influence or another.”
William blackstone
suffrage in the 1830’s
By the 1830s, most states had eliminated their property-ownership requirements, but still largely limited suffrage to white men.
