January 1, 1970

In America it was a similar story. Voting was largely confined to wealthy men until 1870 when the 15^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution declared ‘the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied … on account of race, color, or previous servitude’ (although, despite the work of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, this didn’t include women).

But many people didn’t agree with every man having the vote. Unable to go against the Fifteenth Amendment, some of the former Confederate states took indirect methods – by demanding poll taxes, excluding convicts and anyone who couldn’t read – to take away the vote away from thousands of African Americans and by 1910, they didn’t have the freedom to vote in North Carolina, Alabama, Virginia, Georgia, and Oklahoma.