Suffrage effort still resonates in U.S.

The 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, was ratified 100 years ago today.

The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified 100 years ago today, prohibits the states and the federal government from denying women the right to vote.

But it took many years of protests to secure the amendment’s ratification on Aug. 18, 1920.

Even then, the extension of voting rights was not evenly extended to Black women. Impediments such as poll taxes and literacy tests limited their participation.

I realized that my mother, Margaret Lyon, had spent most of her teenage years unable to vote.

She didn’t talk much about her early years except once on a long train ride with her from Philadelphia to Denver, Colo., where my grandparents lived, she told the story of how she had to work up the courage to go vote.

The right to vote is a core American value, even though not applied fairly to everyone, especially women and Black Americans.

The right to vote was extended, but the evolution was often a slow process, sometimes blocked for decades by imposition of new restrictions.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, sought to overcome legal barriers at the state and local levels.

But the Supreme Court later struck down the heart of this law by a 5-4 vote. This decision freed nine states, mostly in the South, to change their election laws without advance federal approval.

A bill was passed in the House to restore the provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The measure was named after congressman and civil rights activist John Lewis, who died this summer. The legislation is now pending in the U.S. Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has not permitted it to be brought up for a vote.

The right to vote has been a core principle of our form of government since its beginning, even as the nation’s founders limited voting to white men.

Neither women nor slaves were part of that early process, but gradually over time voting has been extended, not restricted as seems to be the case in efforts to limit it — by redistricting or limiting voting by mail.

But, as abolitionist preacher Theodore Parker said in an observation later shared by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement, the moral arm of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

I hope that’s true, for extending the right to vote is a core principle of our country that needs to be expanded, not reduced.

I think about my mother this week spending her early years as a second-class citizen unable to vote. She had always wanted to be an actress, but instead spent her life as a minister’s wife raising five children, myself one of them.

But I often think that she felt unable to fulfill her full potential, not just as a mother and wife but as an actress or public speaker.

That’s why today I remember her and feel her support for extending voting rights to all.

And though I suspect she was a lifelong Republican, she would have been thrilled that after more than a half century since her death, a woman is going to be on this year’s Democratic ticket to be vice president.

My mother, her mother and my two sisters would cheer as I do now.

The right to vote has been a core principle of our form of government since its beginning, even as the nation’s founders limited voting to white men.