African Americans in the United States have only been allowed to vote for 152 years, while the U.S. has been a country for 246. That is about a hundred years that Black people in the U.S. went without voting, and even when the 15th Amendment was passed, there were many ways they were still kept from voting as equal citizens. States began creating poll taxes, where people had to pay to vote, since the time of Jim Crow Laws. Mississippi had even made a “plan” (The Mississippi Plan) to create barriers like property ownership, and literacy tests to ensure their white leaders would be elected.