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Iowa restores the voting rights of felons who completed their prison sentences. [59] Nebraska ends lifetime disenfranchisement of people with felonies but adds a five-year waiting period. [62] 2006. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was extended for the fourth time by President George W. Bush, being the second extension of 25 years. [64]
The American Civil Rights Movement, through such events as the Selma to Montgomery marches and Freedom Summer in Mississippi, gained passage by the United States Congress of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which authorized federal oversight of voter registration and election practices and other enforcement of voting rights. Congress passed the ...
The Senate passed the amendment, with 39 Republicans voting "Yea" and eight Democrats and five Republicans voting "Nay"; 13 Republicans and one Democrat did not vote. [32] Some Radical Republicans, such as Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, abstained from voting because the amendment did not prohibit literacy tests and poll taxes. [33]
Since 1999, only about 20 proposed amendments have received a vote by either the full House or Senate. The last time a proposal gained the necessary two-thirds support in both the House and the Senate for submission to the states was the District of Columbia Voting Rights Amendment in 1978. Only 16 states had ratified it when the seven-year ...
The first major piece of civil rights legislation passed by Congress was the Civil Rights Act of 1957. While enforcing the voting rights of African Americans set out in the Fifteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, the act had several loopholes. Southern states continued to discriminate against African Americans in application of ...
Blacks' regaining the power to vote changed the political landscape of the South. When Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, only about 100 African Americans held elective office, all in northern states. By 1989, there were more than 7,200 African Americans in office, including more than 4,800 in the South.
β – Section 1 of the Seventeenth Amendment, regarding the six-year term of office for senators, was shortened for those persons whose term as senator ended on March 4, 1935, 1937, and 1939, by the interval between January 3 and March 4, of that year (61 days) by the Twentieth Amendment, which became part of the Constitution on January 23 ...
The first African American to vote in the United States after the passage of the 15th Amendment Thomas Mundy Peterson (October 6, 1824 – February 4, 1904) of Perth Amboy, New Jersey , has been claimed to be the first African American to vote in an election under the just-enacted provisions of the 15th Amendment to the United States Constitution .