Transcription
If you're wondering why voting is so important to me and why it should be important to you, let's go back in time for a moment. Let's start with the assassination of President Lincoln, leading to the Andrew Johnson presidency. Johnson, a firm believer in state rights, allowed states post-Civil War to re-establish their own governments. Southern states, free from restraint, drafted their own laws that actively targeted the rights and freedoms of African Americans.
To combat these oppressive laws, Congress passed the 14th and 15th Amendments. Now, former slaves were granted citizenship, and states were prohibited from denying voting rights based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude. But the states simply worked around the amendments with new suppression tactics, ushering in the era of the Jim Crow laws. Poll taxes, literacy tests, legalized segregation. These state and local laws not only suppressed the vote, they made daily life for African-Americans dangerous. The price for resistance was fierce.
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Meanwhile, on the federal level, the 19th Amendment extended voting rights to women. Sorted, because Jim Crow laws still practically denied African-American women the right to vote. Almost a century after the birth of Jim Crow laws, finally a victory with the passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. A year later, the Supreme Court bans the poll tax. The era of Jim Crow is dead, but the era of black voter suppression is not.
In 2012, black voter turnout rate exceeded white voter turnout for the first time in U.S. history, leading to the re-election of President Obama. We are an American family, and we rise or fall together as one nation and as one people. But only a year later, the Supreme Court decided to overturn a key aspect of the Voting Rights Act. Some states no longer need federal approval to change their election laws. A few short years later, we're living in a new but familiar world of threats to voters' rights.
These tactics can make people feel their vote doesn't matter. But history teaches us not just about these challenges, but how we overcame them.
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And why we have an obligation to fulfill the rights that others fought so hard to enable and protect. You can see how important and difficult it was just to gain the right to vote for many of us. Let's not waste this opportunity. Please visit moretoninvote.org.