This week thousands joined in the Georgia “Keep the Vote Alive” march, calling on the Congress to renew the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and on the Justice Department to enforce it. The Voting Rights Act has made a major difference in America. When it was passed, there were some 300 elected minority officials in the U.S.; today there are over 10,000.
There is still much work to be done. The promise of the Voting Rights Act – that every vote would count and every vote would be counted – remains unfulfilled, as illustrated by the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. You can imagine what goes on below the screen in state and local elections.
The right to vote is at the heart of our democracy – yet this all-important right is not explicitly granted to individuals in the U.S. Constitution. Instead, we have states’ rights – a crazy quilt of regulations, requirements and restrictions. This is why we so urgently need renewal of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Central to the Voting Rights Act is that in states with a history of racial segregation, any changes in voting procedures must have pre-clearance by the Justice Department to insure that they do not have a discriminatory effect. The pre-clearance provision of the Voting Rights Act must be enforced, and it must be renewed.
This guarantee will expire in 2007 without Congressional action. That is why thousands joined to call on President Bush to support the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act.
Look at what has happened in the South in the forty years since the Civil Rights revolution that Dr. Martin Luther King led. Racial reconciliation has moved forward. African Americans and whites play on the same athletic teams. There is more socialization, more integration at the workplace. And the South has benefited, with new investors and new industries moving in after segregation was finally outlawed.
The great unfinished business in the South is economic justice. The South has more poor people, more toxic waste dumps, more people without health care, more children condemned to broken schools than any other region of the country. So-called “right to work” laws are used to stop workers from organizing.
Dr. King understood this forty years ago. He went from Selma and the Voting Rights Act to Memphis, to march with sanitation workers struggling for a decent wage. He understood that we had to create the conditions in this society – a decent wage, the right to organize, high quality public education and health care for all – that would enable poor people to work their way out of poverty. But he was taken from us in Memphis, and his agenda remains unfinished.
It will take struggle and work. It won’t be easy. But together we can keep hope alive.