Protests and Voting Rights

During the last couple of weeks, students in History 211, “US Elections,” have been studying some of the most dramatic protests for voting rights in American history.  They studied the story of parades and hunger strikes for woman’s suffrage.  They also learned about the complicated, lengthy struggle to make the Fifteenth Amendment a reality in twentieth-century America.  In 2012, CBS News offered a powerful segment recalling one of those moments of struggle –the violence which erupted on “Bloody Sunday,” March 7, 1965 at the Edmund Pettus Bridge near Selma, Alabama.  After reading Chapters 7 and 8 of Alexander Keyssar’s Right to Vote (2009 ed.), students should be able to identify several elements of this video as being especially teachable for anyone who wants to recall how voting rights and civil rights converged in the mid-twentieth century.