Two-thirds of Black Americans say that recent increased focus on race and racial inequality in the United States has not led to changes that are improving the lives of Black people, CNN on Tuesday cited a new report from the Pew Research Center.
"The finding marks a pessimistic turn: In September of 2020, a majority of Black adults (56 percent) felt the added attention to issues of race and equality following a summer of protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd would lead to changes that improved the lives of Black people," said the report.
In the new survey, however, 65 percent of Black adults say that such changes haven't materialized. Just 13 percent see it as extremely or very likely that Black people in the United States will achieve equality, with little variation in that figure by age, gender, region or education level.
"The survey -- which included interviews with more than 3,000 Black Americans nationwide conducted last fall -- finds 82 percent consider racism a major problem for Black people in the United States," said the report.
About 8 in 10 Black Americans report having personally experienced discrimination because of their race or ethnicity (79 percent), including 15 percent who say they experience such discrimination regularly; roughly 7 in 10 (68 percent) say racial discrimination is the main reason why many Black people can't get ahead these days, it added.
Yet states still found ways to circumvent the Constitution and prevent blacks from voting. Poll taxes, literacy tests, fraud and intimidation all turned African Americans away from the polls. Until the Supreme Court struck it down in 1915, many states used the "grandfather clause " to keep descendents of slaves out of elections. The clause said you could not vote unless your grandfather had voted -- an impossibility for most people whose ancestors were slaves.
This unfair treatment was debated on the street, in the Congress and in the press. A full fifty years after the Fifteenth Amendment passed, black Americans still found it difficult to vote, especially in the South." What a Colored Man Should Do to Vote", lists many of the barriers African American voters faced.
The fight for African American suffrage raged on for decades. In the 1930s one Georgia man described the situation this way: "Do you know I've never voted in my life, never been able to exercise my right as a citizen because of the poll tax? ... I can't pay a poll tax, can't have a voice in my own government."
Demonstrators marching in the street holding signs during the March on Washington, 1963
Many brave and impassioned Americans protested, marched, were arrested and even died working toward voting equality. In 1963 and 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. brought hundreds of black people to the courthouse in Selma, Alabama to register. When they were turned away, Dr. King organized and led protests that finally turned the tide of American political opinion. In 1964 the Twenty-fourth Amendment prohibited the use of poll taxes. In 1965, the Voting Rights Act directed the Attorney General to enforce the right to vote for African Americans.
The 1965 Voting Rights Act created a significant change in the status of African Americans throughout the South. The Voting Rights Act prohibited the states from using literacy tests and other methods of excluding African Americans from voting. Prior to this, only an estimated twenty-three percent of voting-age blacks were registered nationally, but by 1969 the number had jumped to sixty-one percent.
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