Vote Baby Vote: Why Voting Matters.

Americans have died in order to vote. As this midterm election season approaches we can take a moment to remember how hard-earned the right to vote has been for many throughout our nation’s history. With stories of our past in mind, the disenfranchisement of fellow citizens in certain areas of our country (currently more than 7% of the adult populations in Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Virginia are disenfranchised) should be intolerable. When we begin to see a pattern of certain groups of people being treated as “other” and less deserving of basic civil rights, we—hopefully—will be compelled to take action. One of our most basic and fundamental ways to act as citizens of this country is through our right to vote.

Here are some ways to remember why voting matters:

1. Watch Robert Kennedy inform supporters at a campaign stop in Indianapolis, Indiana that Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis that day.

In the footage, Kennedy acknowledges that the crowd’s desire for revenge is understandable. He gives testimony to his own loss—the assassination of his brother five years earlier—but offers the crowd an alternative. “What we need in the United States is not division,” he says. “What we need in the United States is not hatred . . . but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.”

With the benefit of hindsight, Kennedy’s words seem poignant and prophetic. He was assassinated in Los Angeles two months later.

2. Listen to Fannie Lou Hamer’s testimony before the Credentials Committee during the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

Hamer, a Mississippi sharecropper and civil rights leader was brutally beaten in 1963 after attempting to register to vote.

On August 22, 1964 she testified about her experiences, including being forced from her home, being beaten, and witnessing the beatings and whippings of others while in police custody. At the end of her testimony, Hamer asks, “Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave?” We can tell from the tone of her voice that her answer is “no.” Instead, we can tell from listening to her testimony that she is committed to building an America that truly is the land of the free.

3. Check out the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of Civil Rights Martyrs, a list of activists that were killed during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, from 1954 to 1968.

Victims include Vernon Dahmer, a wealthy businessman from Hattiesburg, Mississippi who, while interviewed on a local radio program, offered to pay poll taxes for those in his community who could not afford to. After the radio station broadcasted Dahmer’s interview, his home was fire bombed and he died several days later from severe burns.

4. Watch a movie or read a book. Suggestions:

“Mississippi Burning,” which is based on the murders of three civil rights workers in 1964. Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney were volunteers attempting to register black voters in Neshoba County, Mississippi, when they were abducted and murdered by members of the KKK. In 2014, all three men were posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

“Selma,” the 2014 film directed by Ava DuVernay is based upon the 1965 voting rights marches that traveled the 54-mile highway from Selma, Alabama to the state capital in Montgomery. Marchers were brutally beaten, arrested, faced mob violence and death.

“Suffragette,” the 2015 film chronicling the British suffrage movement. The women’s movement in the United Kingdom was pivotal in shaping the suffrage movement in the United States. Women did not receive the right to vote in America until passage of the 19thAmendment in 1920. In 1848, the first women’s rights convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York with women’s voting rights being central to the convention’s platform.  All told, it took over seventy-years for Congress and the nation to come to a consensus that women should be given the right to vote.

“Freedom Summer” a 2014 documentary that chronicles the summer of 1964, when over 700 students from across the country went to Mississippi to help register African Americans to vote.

Suffragette: My Own Storyby Emmeline Pankhurst. A memoir written by the founder of Britain’s Women’s Social and Political Movement. In 1999 Time Magazine named Pankhurst one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20thCentury for her work in achieving voting rights for women.

The New Jim Crowby Michelle Alexander. According to the Sentencing Project, six million people are disenfranchised due to felony convictions. Alexander explores the social and political impact of mass incarceration on African Americans and argues that mass incarceration has effectively created a new era of segregation in our nation.

5. Read the Constitution.

One of the most basic and fundamental forms of civic and political action we have is our vote. The Constitution mentions the right to vote five times, whereas all of the other rights we guard so carefully—freedom of speech, assembly, and religion; even the right to bear arms—are only mentioned once.

When we magnify the impact of doubting whether our vote truly matters, but going out to vote anyway, with the millions of other people sharing that same uncertainty but choosing to go out and vote too, it’s evident that our vote does matter.

Voting is something we do. It’s taking action. If we stay in a world of hypotheticals, hand wringing, and what-ifs we will never create the change we desire. Just look at the men and women who came before us for proof.

Jacqueline Ruppert, Elephant Academy Apprentice

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