Just as it took intense public pressure to force Congress and President Lyndon B. Johnson to pass the Voting Rights Act in 1965, groups like Black Voters Matter have stepped up their efforts to push the federal government to again intervene to protect voting rights for people of color and young and low-income Americans.
“Democracy is nonnegotiable for us,” Brown said as she and Albright were in the midst of a week-long “Freedom Ride” through the South en route to the nation’s capital. “We’re still going to do everything in our power to push for this. One man or one session is not going to shut it down for us.”
Voting rights has emerged as the top issue for activists and organizers this summer and they are using myriad strategies to call attention to what they describe as an assault on democracy. Stacey Abrams, founder of Fair Fight, launched “Hot Call Summer,” aimed at getting young voters to flood Senate offices with daily telephone calls in support of voting rights.
Abrams also was undaunted by Tuesday’s lack of action in the Senate. “One vote is not going to determine whether or not we have the ability to save our democracy,” said Abrams, a former Georgia gubernatorial candidate and a leader of the Democrats’ voting rights push. “Winning sooner is always better than winning later, but our responsibility is the same responsibility that those who fought in the 1960s had.”
She said the battle over ballot access for Black people has been ongoing. “My parents were part of the civil rights movement as teenagers. My dad was 14 when he was arrested for registering Black people to vote in Mississippi.”
Since the beginning of the year, at least 14 states have enacted 22 laws that restrict voting access, according to the Brennan Center. Several groups have filed lawsuits alleging provisions in the new laws are unconstitutional or violate the civil rights of minority voters.
On Friday, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that the Justice Department would sue Georgia over its new voting law, which drew widespread criticism from Democrats and voting rights activists when it passed in March. Black Voters Matter, which filed suit against Georgia’s Election Integrity Act days after it passed, applauded the announcement, saying in a statement that it was “encouraging to finally see the Department of Justice and the Biden-Harris administration stand with the people.”
The frenzied round of legislation targeting voting followed President Donald Trump’s false claim that he lost the election because of massive voter fraud. Courts tossed out or ruled against more than 60 challenges filed by the Trump campaign.
Republican elections officials and governors in states where Trump lost also rebuffed his efforts to overturn the results, insisting that there was no evidence of widespread fraud. Still, Republican-controlled state legislatures have enacted more restrictive voting laws, citing concerns about the potential for voter fraud.
Voting rights advocates say the real aim of such measures is to make it more difficult for those voters who last year turned out in record numbers for Democrats — people of color, especially Black Americans, along with young voters. Those groups, along with liberal White voters, will increasingly make up a larger share of the electorate as the country’s white population continues to decline.
“We’re up against the most significant backlash on voting rights that we have ever seen,” said Judith Brown Dianis, executive director of the Advance Project, which has sued over provisions of Florida’s new voting law and is supporting several grassroots public education campaigns.
“It is very strategic,” she said. “It is intentionally designed to make it harder for the rising majority to participate, and underneath it, there’s also the big lie about voter fraud. . . . But the real motive isn’t that there was a stolen election. The real motive is that they are enemies of democracy and do not want to see the rise of an inclusive majority. And they understand the changing demographics of America and the browning of America.”
‘Our freedom to vote is under attack’
In addition to filing lawsuits against new voting laws in Florida and Georgia, Black Voters Matter recreated the 1961 Freedom Rides to remind — and educate — Americans about the historic protests in which civil rights activists rode buses from Washington into the South to challenge segregation and the nonenforcement of a Supreme Court decision that banned segregation in interstate bus travel.
The caravan, which set out last Friday from New Orleans, was led by two 45-foot buses wrapped with the words “Freedom Rides” and mug shots of the activists who were arrested for defying Jim Crow laws 60 years ago. Over the course of the week, more than 1,000 volunteers joined about 30 staff members from Black Voters Matter on the tour. Many of those who came out to the rallies were grassroots leaders and volunteers also working to register and educate voters of color and to fight efforts by lawmakers in Republican-led states to restrict voting access. They welcomed their fellow agitators with cheers, smiles and gratitude.
Paco Harvard, president of the NAACP in Columbia, Tenn., said he “felt all kinds of ways . . . when I saw those buses roll up” in front of Grace United Church in the town of 40,000, located about 45 minutes south of Nashville.
The small group of local activists and officials on hand to welcome the group to Tennessee fed them breakfast and sent them off with a prayer for traveling mercies.
Marlene Patrick-Cooper, president of Local 23 of UNITE HERE, a national union representing hospitality workers, joined the tour in New Orleans, where she lives. Jerome Smith, who took part in the original Freedom Rides in 1961, came out to see the group off.
“This has been so moving,” Patrick-Cooper said in an interview Thursday, when the tour had reached West Virginia. “I am so pleased to be able to carry the torch that [Smith] and all the Freedom Riders, like former congressman John Lewis” lit 60 years ago.
Patrick-Cooper said her local represents workers in 13 states, mostly in the South, and her members — along with the entire hospitality industry — suffered greatly during the pandemic. She said she felt compelled to join the protest because “our freedom to vote is under attack.”
Dozens of people ignored the rain from tropical storm Claudette and greeted the buses when they pulled into a Birmingham parking lot last Saturday near the historic 16th Street Baptist Church, where in 1963 four Black girls were killed when a bomb planted by a white supremacist exploded outside the church basement. The bombing and the murder of innocent children marked a turning point in the civil rights movement.
Last Saturday also marked Juneteenth, commemorating the date in 1865 when federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, and read a proclamation freeing enslaved people in the state — more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. Congress, with the support of Senate Republicans, last week made the day a federal holiday. The designation and Biden’s signature on the legislation, sweetened this year’s celebrations across the country.
Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin said those senators should be just as enthusiastic in their support for voting rights.
“We need our elected officials in D.C. to protect us, to stand up, to use their power, just like they used it to make this holiday,” Woodfin said.
“I literally said the other day, I think since y’all are passing out holidays, is Election Day the next one?” Woodfin said in an interview after making remarks from a stage where a D.J. played old school hip-hop and R&B between speeches by local officials and veterans of the civil rights movement who took part in at the city’s Juneteenth celebration.
“The number one thing that I want to see is the John Lewis Voting Rights Act passed — ASAP, pronto, fast, in a hurry,” Woodall, said, referring to legislation named for the late Georgia congressman and civil rights icon. The bill would restore a provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that required states with a history of discriminating against Black voters to get approval from the Justice Department before making changes to voting procedures.
The Supreme Court struck down the requirement in 2015, based on a lawsuit, Woodall lamented, filed by Shelby County, which includes part of his city. Since then states, primarily those controlled by Republicans, have passed laws limiting the types of identification that can be used to register and to vote. They also have shuttered polling places in areas with high concentrations of minority, poor and rural voters and curtailed early voting, in some cases targeting Sunday voting, when Black churches urge their congregations to go to the polls after services. Voting rights groups have fought these laws in court and have often prevailed, but lawmakers simply make minor adjustments and pass the legislation again.
The Freedom Rides caravan traveled by day, the better to show off what Brown called “the blackest bus in America.” However, others were reminded of the dangers the original Freedom Riders faced, including brutal attacks, jail, even a firebombing. Black Voters Matter has been the target of threats, so traveling in daylight was safer for them too. The caravan had police escorts as it moved through Mississippi and Alabama.
During a stop in Nashville, the group met Mary Jean Smith, 79, Frankie Henry, 80, and Novella McCline Page, 83, who participated in the 1960 sit-ins to protest the segregation of Woolworth’s lunch counters. Henry, who had been trained in nonviolent resistance, told how she stared in silent pain at a White woman who stubbed out a lit cigarette on her arm.
In 1965, the nation was horrified by images of Alabama state troopers viciously attacking protesters on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. The protesters included Lewis, who at the time was leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and he nearly died after being beaten in the head by troopers. Days later Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old White woman from Detroit who had come to Selma for a second march to Montgomery, was shot to death by the Ku Klux Klan. President Johnson, who had initially told civil rights leaders that the time was not right to move on a voting rights bill, demanded action from his aides and congressional leaders.
Albright acknowledges that they haven’t faced the intimidation and violence that civil rights protesters endured in the 1960s.
“People may not be dying at a voter suppression protest, but people are surely dying because of voter suppression,” he said in an interview.
At a rally at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park in Atlanta, Albright told a crowd of a few hundred that voter suppression “is a violent crime, because voter suppression has a violent impact in our community.”
Legislatures and governors are enacting laws denying health care for working and low-income Americans and failing to provide basic services, like clean water. He cited Texas, where mismanagement of the state’s electrical grid resulted in protracted power failures that left more than 100 people dead during a powerful winter storm.
Those most affected by the policies of the Republicans who hold power in most of the Southern states are those who supported Biden and other Democratic candidates in the 2020 election. In Georgia, a coalition of BlPOC and young people formed the base of support for Biden’s upset victory in the state. That same coalition defied pundits and turned out in record numbers for a runoff election for two Senate seats that gave Democrats control of the chamber.
“We gave Biden a pathway to the White House and we literally gave him a Senate,” Brown said. “We expect him to deliver, just as we delivered.”
Albright said that he is pleased that Vice President Harris has taken the lead in the effort to protect voting rights and “certainly she’s got skills and talents.”
“But we don’t want them looking at Vice President Harris like she’s got to work some Black girl magic,” he said, adding that Biden needs to be involved in the fight. “He was in the Senate for nearly 40 years. He knows Joe Manchin. . . . He can’t wrangle one vote to get this passed?”
Flonzie Brown Wright, 78, said she hasn’t seen lawmakers act with such focus and defiance to suppress the voter since the 1960s. It’s painful to watch, she said.
Back then in her hometown of Canton, Miss., about 26 miles up interstate 55 from Jackson, more than 10,000 Black people were eligible to vote, but only 152 were registered. Literacy tests, poll taxes and threats of physical violence either disqualified or dissuaded most potential Black voters.
It took years of marches, lawsuits, images of protesters being brutally beaten and the murders of several activists for Congress to pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Wright, who managed the NAACP branch in Canton, still had to request federal examiners to oversee the voter registration.
“We fought and we worked so hard. And for a while we felt that we had achieved some things, particularly with the passage of the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act” said Wright.
Wright was subjected to racist taunts and threats. White men in pickup trucks would sit outside her house to intimidate her. The phone would ring in the middle of the night with warnings that she should keep an eye on her children. But she didn’t back down, and in 1968 she won a seat on the town’s election commission, becoming the first black woman elected to public office in Mississippi.
The resurgence of the attacks on voting and civil rights all these years later is troubling, but not unexpected, Wright said.
“It’s always going to be a struggle,” she said. Historically, she said, a segment of Whites sought to deny Black Americans their humanity and rights as full citizens. Now those people are alarmed at the country’s demographic changes. “Voter suppression is an attempt to keep the now majority — soon to be the minority — in power. That’s the bottom line,” Wright said. “It’s really all about the vote.”
Reminding people of the courage of civil rights activists like Wright is central to Black Voters Matter’s ongoing work to mobilize communities of color to not only vote, but to hold elected officials accountable, including pushing them to protect access to the ballot.
At the rally in Atlanta, Albright, said it was impossible to hear stories about how the Freedom Riders were not deterred by intimidation and violence. Less than two weeks after the Freedom Rides began, White racists in Alabama firebombed one of their buses bus and beat the riders as they fled the flaming vehicle.
“There is no way for you to hear that history without asking yourself, 'What is my role going to be in today’s voting rights movement?” Albright told the crowd. “There is a role for everybody to play in this movement. That’s why we say everybody is a freedom rider. . . . I need all y’all to put a fist up and I need you to say I am a freedom rider! I am a freedom rider! I am a freedom rider!”
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