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A photograph (2010) of a group of African Americans marching across a bridge, One marcher holds a sign about voting rights.
45th Anniversary of the Civil Rights March from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery, Alabama

Spotlight on Elections Presentation: Voters and Voting Rights

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This post is the third in a series highlighting different parts of a newly updated classroom resource on presidential elections and voting.

Broadly speaking, the Elections presentation looks at the relationship between presidential candidates and the voters. Who gets to be a voter has changed over time. The voters and voting rights section of the presentation uses primary sources to explore how various groups have worked to secure and keep the right to vote.

Women’s Suffrage: What strategies did women use to win a constitutional right to vote? 

This section features sources that highlight the U.S. women’s suffrage movement, as well as how activists in the movement used first amendment protections to win a constitutional right to vote.  Students could look at some or all of the sources that showcase different tactics and examine the items with an eye to how a particular freedom, or combination of freedoms, was significant to the cause of women’s suffrage.

African American Voting Rights: How did African Americans reaffirm and protect their constitutional right to vote? 

The 15th amendment (1870) gave African American males the right to vote; however, in practice many could not. During and immediately following Reconstruction, many southern governments added voting restrictions that disproportionately affected African Americans. This section looks at the work of African Americans and their allies to expose, challenge, and remove barriers to voting.

Teachers may assign students specific sources or the full set. Working with a partner or in a small group, students could:

  • Use the source and analysis questions to reflect on the following: What can this source tell you about efforts to reaffirm or protect African American voting rights? What new questions does the source raise about the status of voting rights for African Americans, at the time that this source was created?
  • Share their reflections with the whole class and identify common themes, notable differences, and the value of primary sources to examining the cause of African American suffrage.
Native American Voting Rights: What challenges have Native Americans faced in exercising voting rights? 

Tribes, and their citizenry, hold distinct group rights that reflect the long and complex relationship between the U.S. government and Native American nations. Native Americans faced centuries of struggle before acquiring full U.S. citizenship—for those who wanted it—and legal protection of their voting rights as citizens of both tribal nations and the United States.

  • Two Native newspapers and one Non-native publication are featured in this section. Teachers could assign students to read the articles and pay close attention to perspectives presented each: From what point of view is the article written? How does the author’s perspective impact the information provided to the reader? What additional information do students want to know after reading the article?
Youth Vote: What events spurred a movement to lower the voting age to eighteen? 

The 26th Amendment (1971) lowered the national voting age from twenty-one to eighteen. Like many movements, efforts to make this change started long before the law went into effect. This section looks at early efforts to lower the voting age and what primary sources can teach us about motivations for those efforts.

  • Teachers could structure an activity in which students pay close attention to the arguments for and against lowering the voting age, as presented in the two newspaper articles. What evidence was presented to support different sides of the issue? What arguments do students find most compelling and why?

We hope this post as well as others in the series are helpful for thinking about ways you can use the Elections resource with your students. If you have any recommendations to share, please post in the comments!

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