In honor of Black History Month, all month long we will be sharing the legacies and stories of the heroes, sheroes, and events in the fight for Black suffrage on social media under the hashtag #VRABlackHistory. Follow us on Twitter (@VRAmatters) to share your own facts.
Today we honor an early fight for Black suffrage. In 1723-1724, Richard West, who was Legal Counsel for the Board of Trade, questioned the Virginia General Assembly as to why they took away voting rights from freed Black men.
This article exemplified the complexities of the fight for Black suffrage during a colonial era built on the immoral institution of slavery.
Background
The beauty of documented law is that it stands in opposition to attempts to deny or erase America's racial history. Nobody can say that something didn’t occur if in court documents and state law it has already been chronicled. The law captures the values and norms of that particular generation. And so it is with voting rights. Many erroneously think that the fight for Black suffrage (voting rights) didn’t occur until around 1870, when the 15th Amendment was passed, granting African American men with the right to vote. However, that is just not true. In fact, some Black people were voting in the early 1700’s. A number of early state constitutions allowed for freed Black men to vote, including "those of Delaware (1776), Maryland (1776), New Hampshire (1784), and New York (1777)” (footnotes omitted). In fact, in “some early American towns such as Baltimore had more blacks than white voting in elections”.