A Voting Rights Odyssey PDF Download

Author: Laughlin McDonald
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521011792
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Author: Laughlin McDonald
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806186003
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
The struggle for voting rights was not limited to African Americans in the South. American Indians also faced discrimination at the polls and still do today. This book explores their fight for equal voting rights and carefully documents how non-Indian officials have tried to maintain dominance over Native peoples despite the rights they are guaranteed as American citizens. Laughlin McDonald has participated in numerous lawsuits brought on behalf of Native Americans in Montana, Colorado, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wyoming. This litigation challenged discriminatory election practices such as at-large elections, redistricting plans crafted to dilute voting strength, unfounded allegations of election fraud on reservations, burdensome identification and registration requirements, lack of language assistance, and noncompliance with the Voting Rights Act. McDonald devotes special attention to the VRA and its amendments, whose protections are central to realizing the goal of equal political participation. McDonald describes past and present-day discrimination against Indians, including land seizures, destruction of bison herds, attempts to eradicate Native language and culture, and efforts to remove and in some cases even exterminate tribes. Because of such treatment, he argues, Indians suffer a severely depressed socioeconomic status, voting is sharply polarized along racial lines, and tribes are isolated and lack meaningful interaction with non-Indians in communities bordering reservations. Far more than a record of litigation, American Indians and the Fight for Equal Voting Rights paints a broad picture of Indian political participation by incorporating expert reports, legislative histories, newspaper accounts, government archives, and hundreds of interviews with tribal members. This in-depth study of Indian voting rights recounts the extraordinary progress American Indians have made and looks toward a more just future.

Author: Tamra Orr
Publisher: Mitchell Lane Publishers, Inc.
ISBN: 161228339X
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 48

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Have you ever voted on something? You might have voted for pizza for dinner, which movie to watch or who should go first in a game. If you have ever voted, you know how important it is to have a voice in making decisions that are part of your life. The people who created this country knew that too and took many risks to create a country where they could speak freely about what they wanted. The battle for voting rights was a long one—with some people being allowed to vote long before others. Read about who made the decisions and who had to fight for the same rights. Seeing how hard African Americans, Native Americans, and women fought to have the right to vote reminds everyone that voting is part of what created this country—and what will help it keep growing and changing today and in the future. About each book:

Author: Garrine P. Laney
Publisher: Nova Publishers
ISBN: 9781590336717
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 94

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By passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Congress challenged the widespread evidence of disfranchisement of black citizens in certain southern states. This Act protects citizens' right to vote by forbidding covered states from using any tests that would determine eligibility to vote, by requiring these states to obtain federal approval before enacting any election laws and by assigning federal officials to monitor the registration process in certain localities. In 1970, Congress extended the Voting Rights Act for an additional 5 years and its coverage to other jurisdictions when evidence presented at congressional hearings revealed continued racial discrimination in voting. Throughout the next three decades, further legislation was added to the Act, to more wholly protect the individual citizen of this country. This book delves into the history of the Voting Rights Act as well as the current challenges and issues that face Congress. Contents: Introduction; The Voting Rights Act of 1965; The Voting Rights Amendments of 1970; The Voting Rights Amendments of 1975; The Voting Rights Amendments of 1982; The Voting Rights Amendments of 1992; Current Major Provisions of the Act; Presiden

Author: Alexander Keyssar
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465010148
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Originally published in 2000, The Right to Vote was widely hailed as a magisterial account of the evolution of suffrage from the American Revolution to the end of the twentieth century. In this revised and updated edition, Keyssar carries the story forward, from the disputed presidential contest of 2000 through the 2008 campaign and the election of Barack Obama. The Right to Vote is a sweeping reinterpretation of American political history as well as a meditation on the meaning of democracy in contemporary American life.

Author: Susan Buckley
Publisher: Benchmark Education Company
ISBN: 1616721545
Category : Minorities
Languages : en
Pages : 52

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Author: Zachary Mason
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 9781429952491
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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A BRILLIANT AND BEGUILING REIMAGINING OF ONE OF OUR GREATEST MYTHS BY A GIFTED YOUNG WRITER Zachary Mason's brilliant and beguiling debut novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, reimagines Homer's classic story of the hero Odysseus and his long journey home after the fall of Troy. With brilliant prose, terrific imagination, and dazzling literary skill, Mason creates alternative episodes, fragments, and revisions of Homer's original that taken together open up this classic Greek myth to endless reverberating interpretations. The Lost Books of the Odyssey is punctuated with great wit, beauty, and playfulness; it is a daring literary page-turner that marks the emergence of an extraordinary new talent.

Author: Ari Berman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374711496
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, Nonfiction A New York Times Notable Book of 2015 A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2015 A Boston Globe Best Book of 2015 A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2015 An NPR Best Book of 2015 Countless books have been written about the civil rights movement, but far less attention has been paid to what happened after the dramatic passage of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 1965 and the turbulent forces it unleashed. Give Us the Ballot tells this story for the first time. In this groundbreaking narrative history, Ari Berman charts both the transformation of American democracy under the VRA and the counterrevolution that has sought to limit voting rights, from 1965 to the present day. The act enfranchised millions of Americans and is widely regarded as the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement. And yet, fifty years later, we are still fighting heated battles over race, representation, and political power, with lawmakers devising new strategies to keep minorities out of the voting booth and with the Supreme Court declaring a key part of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional. Berman brings the struggle over voting rights to life through meticulous archival research, in-depth interviews with major figures in the debate, and incisive on-the-ground reporting. In vivid prose, he takes the reader from the demonstrations of the civil rights era to the halls of Congress to the chambers of the Supreme Court. At this important moment in history, Give Us the Ballot provides new insight into one of the most vital political and civil rights issues of our time.

Author: Charles S. Bullock
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 080615442X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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On June 25, 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Shelby County v. Holder, invalidating a key provision of voting rights law. The decision—the culmination of an eight-year battle over the power of Congress to regulate state conduct of elections—marked the closing of a chapter in American politics. That chapter had opened a century earlier in the case of Guinn v. United States, which ushered in national efforts to knock down racial barriers to the ballot. A detailed and timely history, The Rise and Fall of the Voting Rights Act analyzes changing legislation and the future of voting rights in the United States. In tracing the development of the Voting Rights Act from its inception, Charles S. Bullock III, Ronald Keith Gaddie, and Justin J. Wert begin by exploring the political and legal aspects of the Jim Crow electoral regime. Detailing both the subsequent struggle to enact the law and its impact, they explain why the Voting Rights Act was necessary. The authors draw on court cases and election data to bring their discussion to the present with an examination of the 2006 revision and renewal of the act, and its role in shaping the southern political environment in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, when Barack Obama was chosen. Bullock, Gaddie, and Wert go on to closely evaluate the 2013 Shelby County decision, describing how the ideological makeup of the Supreme Court created an appellate environment that made the act ripe for a challenge. Rigorous in its scholarship and thoroughly readable, this book goes beyond history and analysis to provide compelling and much-needed insight into the ways voting rights legislation has shaped the United States. The Rise and Fall of the Voting Rights Act illuminates the historical roots—and the human consequences—of a critical chapter in U.S. legal history.

Author: J. Douglas Smith
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0809074230
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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"The inside story of the Supreme Court decisions that brought true democracy to the United States Today, Earl Warren is recalled as the chief justice of a Supreme Court that introduced school desegregation and other dramatic changes to American society. In retirement, however, Warren argued that his court's greatest accomplishment was establishing the principle of "one person, one vote" in state legislative and congressional redistricting. Malapportionment, Warren recognized, subverted the will of the majority, privileging rural voters, and often business interests and whites, over others. In declaring nearly all state legislatures unconstitutional, the court oversaw a revolution that transformed the exercise of political power in the United States. On Democracy's Doorstep tells the story of this crucial--and neglected--episode. J. Douglas Smith follows lawyers, activists, and Justice Department officials as they approach the court. We see Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy pushing for radical change and idealistic lawyers in Alabama bravely defying their peers. We then watch as the justices edge toward their momentous decision. The Washington Post called the result a step "toward establishing democracy in the United States." But not everyone agreed; Smith shows that business lobbies and their political allies attempted to overturn the court by calling the first Constitutional Convention since the 1780s. Thirty-three states ratified their petition--just one short of the two-thirds required"--