Congress has dealt with issues of voter disenfranchisement on the basis of race throughout history. The question of suffrage for District of Columbia residents in 1844 demonstrated how the enfranchisement of D.C. residents and Black American men was interconnected. In that year, the Senate Committee for the District of Columbia, which held jurisdiction over D.C. from 1816 until 1977, debated a bill (H. R. 437) to extend voting rights – recognized as the “highest political privilege” – to “all free white male citizens of the United States, whether native-born or naturalized, who have attained the age of twenty-one years” living in D.C. (H. Rpt. No. 24, 28th Cong., 2d Sess., at 1 (1844) reprinted in Serial Set Vol. 468.)
The elections to which this bill refers are specific to the District of Columbia: “boards of aldermen and common council, and for all other officers that now are, ore hereafter may be, elective by the people under the charter of said city of Washington.” (A Bill to extend the right of suffrage in the city of Washington, H.R. 437, 28th Cong., 2d Sess. (1844).) “The principle so long struggled for, “