Voting Rights: A History

The second installment in Ken Burns’s eye-opening profile of the women’s suffrage movement, this program depicts the later years of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. With the help of rarely seen archival materials and voice-over portrayals by well-known actors, viewers learn how the struggle for women’s rights gained momentum in America and coalesced around the right to vote.

KUED takes a moving and insightful look into the history, operation, and legacy of the federal Indian Boarding School system, whose goal was total assimilation of Native Americans at the cost of stripping away Native culture, tradition, and language.

A set of Supreme Court decisions made over 100 years ago has left U.S. territories without meaningful representation. That’s weird, right?

In 1964, less than 7% of Mississippi’s African Americans were registered to vote, compared to between 50 and 70% in other southern states. In many rural counties, African Americans made up the majority of the population and the segregationist white establishment was prepared to use any means necessary to keep them away from the polls and out of elected office.

Various literacy tests and voter application forms from five southern states.

An actual literacy test from the State of Alabama from the 1960s.

In this edition of Moyers & Company, acclaimed historian Gary May—a specialist in American political, diplomatic, and social history—joins Bill to put the recent Supreme Court decision gutting the Voting Rights Act into historical perspective, noting it’s just one moment in a long, ongoing struggle to ensure voting rights for every American.

Constitutional Rights Foundation & Barat Education Foundation Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Program