Post #3641448

Bigotry was not one of our founding principles. You say that, but… 1790: The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited citizenship to “free white persons.”[23] In practice, only white male property owners could naturalize and acquire the status of citizens, and the vote. The 1828 presidential election was the first in which non-property-holding white males could vote in the vast majority of states. By the end of the 1820s, attitudes and state laws had shifted in favor of universal white male suffrage. It was not until the passing of the Fifteenth Amendment that men of all races were allowed to vote: 1870: The Fifteenth Amendment prevents state governments and the federal government from denying the right to vote on grounds of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude”. And it would be another 50 years before women were granted the right to vote: 1920: Women are guaranteed the right to vote in all US States by the Nineteenth Amendment. In practice, the same restrictions that hindered the ability of poor or non-white men to vote now also applied to poor or non-white women. There’s some other interesting bits in here: 1943: Chinese immigrants given the right to citizenship and the right to vote by the Magnuson Act. 1948: Arizona and New Mexico became one of the last states to extend full voting rights to Native Americans, which had been opposed by some western states in contravention of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. 1965: Protection of voter registration and voting for racial minorities, later applied to language minorities, is established by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This has also been applied to correcting discriminatory election systems and districting. 1966: Tax payment and wealth requirements for voting in state elections are prohibited by the Supreme Court in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. en.wikipedia.org/…/Voting_rights_in_the_United_St… So… it seems like the bigotry has kind of always been part of the system, and had to be specifically legislated against ex post facto.