Teaching About Voting Rights and Voter Suppression

Zinn Education Project - Teaching People's History

Teach the Struggle

for Voting Rights

Artwork by Ricardo Levins Morales, available as a poster.

As they make their way to the polls, drop boxes, or post offices to vote in what is the most consequential U.S. presidential election in our lifetimes, voters navigate not only the pandemic, but also new waves of voter suppression.

From Republican officials in Texas and Ohio limiting ballot drop boxes to one per county, to the requirement of witness signatures (during a health crisis that requires social distancing) for mail-in ballots in the swing states of Wisconsin and North Carolina, Trump’s GOP is undermining fair elections. These tactics are not new. It is critical that students learn about the long history of voter suppression and the fight for voting rights.

Voting Rights Unit

Who Gets to Vote? Teaching About the Struggle

for Voting Rights in the United States

A unit with three lessons by Ursula Wolfe-Rocca provides essential historical context for today’s struggle against voter suppression and for voting rights.

The first lesson considers the question of who should vote. Students share their thoughts on what makes a “qualified” voter, then reconsider after reading an oral history by Fannie Lou Hamer, born in 1917. Mrs. Hamer was 45 the first time she attempted to register to vote.

Here is an excerpt from that oral history interview:

McMillen: When you first tried to vote, where was that? Was that in Ruleville?

Hamer: Well, when I first tried to register it was in Indianola. I went to Indianola on the 31st of August in 1962; that was to try to register. When we got there — there was 18 of us went that day — so when we got there, there were people there with guns. We went on in the circuit clerk’s office, and he asked us what did we want; and we told him what we wanted. We wanted to try to register. He told us that all of us would have to get out of there except two.

The second lesson asks students to predict how policymakers might have restricted the right to vote for certain groups to thwart movements and laws that expanded voting rights.

The final lesson is a mixer role play. Students learn about people with firsthand experience having their voting rights granted or denied. The roles reach back to the colonial era and forward to the present. A timeline activity asks students to create a visual map depicting the expansion and contraction of voting rights over time.

These lessons can be taught individually or in sequence.

Learn More and Download Unit

Teach the 15th Amendment

This is the 150th anniversary of the 15th Amendment — the Reconstruction Amendment on the right to vote. On this anniversary, more than 150 leading scholars of U.S. history have signed an open letter to school districts on the need to devote more time and resources to the Reconstruction era.

Teach Voting Rights

Teach Reconstruction

Reconstruction, the era immediately following the Civil War and emancipation, is full of stories that can help students see the possibility of a future defined by racial equity. We offer lessons, a local history mapping project to make Reconstruction history visible, and an annotated list of recommended books and films for K–12.

Teach Reconstruction

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