This course is about the effort to establish and secure voting rights in the United States. It involves inquiry into parallel activities: the legal status of voting as sought in court rulings through litigation, and community level activism organized to protest restrictive practices often at state and local levels where pivotal decisions about voting policy originate. This course is an overview of this process and the pivotal convergences between the legal and organizing aspects. We seek to better understand the main pillar in popular participation by study focused on distinctive moments in national development in an advanced democratic state looking at the content of suffrage policy, the struggle to democratize, and the uneven results.