Fight for Independence in the United States

The case study chosen for this project is the legislation in the United States surrounding Black suffrage. The U.S. fought for independence from Great Britain, and won this war in 1776. A large part of the propaganda surrounding the revolutionary fight concerned the rights and freedoms of everyday people. However, the U.S. still formally approved of slavery—chattel slavery, in which Black kidnapping victims from Africa were bought and sold as property—until the end of the Civil War, in 1865. During Reconstruction, the 15th Amendment was passed, supposedly guaranteeing all Americans, including African Americans, the right to vote. However, a full century later another law was needed, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This law precluded measures, such as voting taxes and literacy tests, that had been used since the end of the Civil War to prevent Black people in the U.S. from voting (Hill et al., 2021). 
There are several reasons that this particular case study is interesting and worth pursuing. One is that a full century should have been necessary, following the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction, in order to provide Black Americans with rights that had been enshrined in the 15th Amendment. Another reason is that, even after all of this, the Supreme Court effectively decided that no further protection of Black voting rights should be necessary in 2019 (“Shelby county v. Holder,” n.d.). The reasoning was that any restrictions on voting rights should have to be probably discriminatory until the federal government would ban the restrictions. However, since it is so easy to disguise racist voting laws and regulations as protections against non-race-involved bans, such as the bans on voter fraud, the Supreme Court arguably gutted the power of the 15th Amendment and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The court left open the door to find seemingly non-race-specific ways of preventing Black Americans from voting, which were supposed to have been closed by earlier legislation (Perez, 2020). 

References
Hill, D., Coleman, M., & Bassett, E. (2021). Disenfranchisement and suppression of Black voters in the United States. Ballard Brief. http://tinyurl.com/3wts5nm6
Perez, M. (2020, June 25). 7 years of gutting voting rights. Brennan Center. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/7-years-gutting-voting-rights
Shelby county v. Holder. (n.d.). Oyez. https://www.oyez.org/cases/2012/12-96