Voting Rights for Black Americans: Thematic History Lesson

In a traditional, chronological history course, it is difficult for students to understand how voting rights for Black Americans evolved over time. This makes it an ideal topic to develop into a broad period lesson rather than a one-day focus on events occurring in the early 1960s. 

For instance, a traditional lesson on the 1965 Voting Rights Act can demonstrate why the legislation was enacted and the impact it made in a brief period, but the broader approach can show the difficulties of more than a century’s worth of agitating, advocating, and demanding changes to the franchise. It is important for students to understand that major changes do not simply happen overnight; it can take decades, even centuries to realize change. Furthermore, the narrow approach to the Voting Rights Act runs the risk of centering top-down administrative decision-making, whereas the broad approach can highlight the efforts of various grassroots agents across a longer spectrum of time. The traditional lesson may also mislead students to believe the 1965 legislation was a permanent solution to voting access in the country; however, a broad thematic lesson can illuminate a process that continues to expand and contract throughout the nation today, making this historical development more relevant to students’ lives.

The lesson we provide here is from our thematic unit on the African American Freedom Rights Movement. We incorporated our essential ingredients of inquiry-based learning, engaging students with topical subject matter, and centering the perspectives of marginalized groups, specifically Black Americans. This broad period lesson illustrates how you can create a thematic lesson that traces one topic over multiple decades. Download the following lesson below.

Since this type of lesson plan spans a broad period of time, it is important to consider the order in which we present the material to our students. We begin in the present day to engage students’ curiosity by connecting the historical content to recent developments with passage of contemporary voting laws. Students may naturally question how we got to this point today with our voting laws. We want to provide the necessary historical context and content so students can answer this question for themselves. For students to make these past-to-present connections, we must go back to the inception of federal voting rights for Black Americans starting with the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution. This creates a starting point for a timeline that spans 150 years of history. Then we trace the key milestones in Black American voting from there, so students can understand the causal relations among these events, as they determine how and why access to the franchise has changed and remained the same.

In this lesson, after we engage students with current events, we tap into their prior knowledge about political rights and limitations during the Reconstruction Era through the mid-twentieth century. Using a combination of primary source documents and videos, students work in pairs and independently to investigate relative voter access and the impact it has had on marginalized groups. We present this broad history chronologically so students will be less likely to get “lost” in over 150 years of events concerning voting rights for Black Americans. Finally, we conclude the lesson with a formative assessment that requires students to address the lesson focus question on voting rights accessibility across that broad period of time.