Call to action on voting rights
Too often, the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a federal holiday since 1986, has devolved into a nostalgic and self-congratulatory look backward that sanitizes the message of the civil rights icon. This year, more than ever, the third Monday of January should become a call to action.
No doubt, King would have been on the front lines today of the fight against voter suppression laws, reminiscent of the Jim Crow era. Misinformation and outright lies, asserting the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump, have provided ideological cover for new voter laws, some as pernicious as the literacy tests and poll taxes of seven decades ago.
Last year, 19 states passed more than 300 laws that, in some way, suppressed voting, including cuts to early voting, strict voter ID laws requiring certain kinds of governmentissued photo IDs, and wholesale purges of voting rolls that erroneously disenfranchise eligible voters.
In Georgia, legislators made it a crime to provide food and water to voters standing in often long lines at the polls. In Pennsylvania, Gov. Tom Wolf vetoed a Republican bill that included sweeping voting restrictions, but two dozen other such bills will carry into the 2022 legislative session.
Moreover, longstanding felony disenfranchisement laws in states still restrict voting rights for more than 2 million people who have completed their sentences. (Pennsylvania is not one of those states.) Like all voter suppression laws, these disproportionately affect communities of color and the poor.
King spoke of the “fierce urgency of now,” using nonviolent direct action as a tool to change unjust and immoral laws that buttressed segregation
and inequality.
The early years of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, running from 1954 to 1968, focused on voting rights and segregation. Later, King opposed the Vietnam War, and the movement he led shifted to overcoming poverty and economic inequality in America.
King, 39, was assassinated in Memphis in 1968, while preparing to lead a march of striking sanitation workers. More than 50 years later, inequality persists in rates of incarceration, poverty, college graduation and deaths from COVID-19, to name a few. Activists have continued to advocate for ending poverty and changing economic conditions. More recently, a mass movement started for criminal justice reform.
Sadly, however, voting rights, an issue the nation thought it had largely resolved with the 1965 Voting Rights Act, are once again at the forefront of threats to justice. To protect those rights and democracy itself, Congress ought to push a debate in the U.S. Senate on Freedom to Vote and Voting Rights Advancement legislation.
Congress can best celebrate the birthday of the civil rights icon by providing some national standards and critical protections for a lodestone of the Civil Rights Movement: The rights of everyone to vote.