Timeline: African-Americans and the Right to Vote

African-American have struggled hard and long for the right to vote. Below is a timeline of the African-American vote:
1776 White men with property can vote. Free black men can vote in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut.
1789 Establishment of the American democracy. White
men with property can vote. Poor people cannot vote. Women, Native Americans, and enslaved African-Americans cannot vote.
1857 In the Dred Scott case, the Supreme Court decides that African Americans are not citizens of the U.S., and that Congress has no power to restrict slavery in any federal territory. This meant that a slave who made it to a free state would still be considered a slave.
1865 Congress passes the Thirteenth Amendment, outlawing slavery, and establishes the Freedmen's Bureau to assist former slaves. This is the beginning of the Reconstruction era.
1866 All-white legislatures in the former Confederate states pass the so-called "Black Codes," sharply curtailing African Americans' freedom and virtually re-enslaving them.
1866 Congress passes the Civil Rights Act, which confers citizenship on African Americans and grants them equal rights with whites.
1870 The 15th Amendment establishes the right of African-American men to vote. In the South especially, poll taxes, reading requirements, physical violence, property destruction, hiding the polls, and economic pressures keep most African-Americans from voting.
1872 P.B.S. Pinchback, the first African American state governor (of Louisiana), is elected to the House of Representatives; the election is disputed. He will be elected to the U.S. Senate in 1873, with the election again disputed.
1889 Florida adopts a poll tax. Ten other southern states will implement poll taxes.
1890 Mississippi adopts a literacy test to keep African Americans from voting. Numerous other states—not just in the south—also establish literacy tests. However, the tests also exclude many whites from voting. To get around this, states add grandfather clauses that allow those who could vote before 1870, or their descendants, to vote regardless of literacy or tax qualifications.
1898 Louisiana tries to disenfranchise its African Americans by passing a "grandfather clause" limiting the right to vote to anyone whose fathers and grandfathers were qualified on January 1, 1867. (No African Americans had the right to vote at that time.)
1920 White and African-American women gain the right to vote. (Prior to 1920, some parts of the country let some women vote. For what or for whom they could vote depended on where they were. Some could vote only in school elections.)
1964 The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), CORE and the NAACP and other civil-rights groups organize a massive African American voter registration drive in Mississippi known as "Freedom Summer." Three CORE civil rights workers are murdered. In the five years following Freedom Summer, black voter registration in Mississippi will rise from a mere 7 percent to 67 percent.
1964 President Lyndon Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act, which gives the federal government far-reaching powers to prosecute discrimination in employment, voting, and education.
1965 King organizes a protest march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, for African American voting rights. A shocked nation watches on television as police club and teargas protesters.
1965 In the wake of the Selma-Montgomery March, the Voting Rights Act is passed, outlawing the practices used in the South to disenfranchise African American voters
1967 Edward W. Brooke becomes the first African American U.S. Senator since Reconstruction. He serves two terms as a Republican from Massachusetts.
1968 Shirley Chisholm becomes the first African American woman to be elected to Congress.
References:
Civilrights.org, “Civil Rights: A Chronology,” civilrights.org, http://www.civilrights.org/research_center/permanent_collection/resource...
Japanese American National Museum. Teaching the Japanese American Experience: An Educator’s Tool Kit. 2004.
KLCS, “African American World Timeline,” Public Broadcasting System, http://www.pbs.org/wnet/aaworld/timeline.htm
http://www.peaceworkmagazine.org/pwork/0410/041005.htm
http://www.infoplease.com/timelines/voting.html
http://academic.udayton.edu/race/04needs/98newburg.htm#_Hlk439126746