Parents' Guide to Represent: The Unfinished Fight for the Vote

REPRESENT begins in 1787, when 55 men (almost half of them slave owners) gathered in Philadelphia to draft the United States Constitution and decided each state would have the right to determine who did and didn't have the right to vote. The result: People in power (White, male landowners, by and large) became determined to keep that power by controlling who could vote. The 15th Amendment passed in 1870 may have given Black men the vote, but across the South, new laws made that virtually impossible. It wasn't until 1920, after decades of activism by both Black and White women, that the 19th Amendment giving women the vote was ratified by the states. In the North and West, millions of immigrants from Europe and Asia were the targets of voter suppression. Chinese-born American citizens couldn't vote until 1943, and even though Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924, it was 40 years before all Native Americans gained the right to vote. It took shocking television images of violence against civil rights activists in the South to pressure Congress into passing the 1968 Voting Rights Act, outlawing racial discrimination in voting. In the 1970s, Latino activists began to fight back against "Juan Crow" laws in the West that used poll taxes and literacy tests to keep Mexican Americans from voting. Even today, the fight is unfinished as purging voter rolls, voter ID laws, gerrymandering of congressional districts, and big money influencers mean there are still Americans being denied their right to vote. The book ends with the false allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 election and the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.