Keep The Vote Alive
- From: "GWhyte" <gwhyte3003@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2005 22:25:16 -0400
Keep The Vote Alive
By Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr
© Tribune Media Services
http://www.blacknews.com/pr/alive101.html
Forty years ago, on bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama, a courageous band of
people of conscience marched across Edmund Pettus Bridge to demand the right
to vote. These peaceful demonstrators were attacked by police with tear gas
and heavy clubs. Bloodied, their sacrifice touched the conscience of a
nation. And as President, Lyndon Johnson pushed through the Voting Rights
Act that finally gave African Americans the right to vote in the South.
Now forty years later, it is time to march again. And this Sunday, August 6,
thousands will gather in Atlanta for a march and rally to "Keep the Vote
Alive." The reason is that basic rights are once more under assault.
The Voting Rights Act must be reauthorized before it expires in 2007.
Violations of the equal right to vote have been startlingly apparent in the
last two presidential elections. The president's new nominee for the Supreme
Court, John Roberts, made his reputation calling for cutting back civil
rights laws during the Reagan administration. Republican activists have made
it clear that they don't fare well when African Americans and Latinos and
other minorities vote in large numbers. We must march to keep the vote
alive.
But that is not all. The democratic revolution that Dr. Martin Luther King
led was about basic civil rights, the right to vote, but also about economic
justice and peace. We now have an economy in which profits are up, CEO
salaries are soaring, productivity is up, but workers wages are stagnant and
benefits like health care and pensions are being slashed. There is no plan
to invest in America and no commitment to empowering workers to gain a fair
share of the profits they help to generate. Instead, we are spending $6
billion a month on "nation building" in Iraq, with the sons and daughters of
working families mired in an occupation for which they have neither proper
training nor proper equipment. It is time to march once more.
The Voting Rights Act itself has helped move America out of legalized
segregation. When it was passed only 300 African Americans held public
office, now 9100 do. Only 2 African Americans were in Congress, now 43 are.
Latinos and Asian Americans have had their rights protected also. For
example, section 203 of the Voting Rights Act requires some 450 counties and
townships to provide bilingual assistance to voters where it is needed.
Section 5, the heart of the act, requires pre-clearance of any election
alteration in some 16 states before it takes effect, to determine whether it
is discriminatory in purpose or effect. Even if enforcement has varied over
the years, this provides a fundamental protection for minority voters. The
Voting Rights Act must be reauthorized. It is time to march again.
The August 6 march is co-sponsored by over 30 organizations. It will feature
leaders like Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader of the House of
Representatives; Rep. John Lewis, Ambassador Andrew Young, Senator Richard
Durbin; and stars like Stevie Wonder, Willie Nelson and Roberta Flack; labor
leaders like John Sweeney and Andy Stern. We are going to build a new
coalition of conscience, a new democracy movement for America.
It is time to march once more. In Washington, one third of the programs up
for cuts by this administration are in education. College is being priced
out of reach of more and more middle income families - and yet the
administration is breaking its promise of increasing Pell grants even as it
fights furiously to extend more tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans. This
administration and Congress seem to believe that there should be no ceiling
on the wealthiest Americans and no floor under the poorest. The
administration ignores the present crisis in health care while crying wolf
about Social Security. The president trumpets ownership while undermining
good jobs, good wages, and affordable high quality health care for all.
Ownership without equal rights, economic justice, and educational
opportunity is a false idol. Slavery was an ownership society but not a
moral society.
This is a time when the administration and Congress seem to grow more
arrogant, even as they grow more distant from the needs and values of the
American people. The fundamental guarantee of equal opportunity is once more
under assault. Congress votes to remove taxes on the estates of
billionaires; at the same time it refused to raise the minimum wage. It
makes it easier for the idle heirs of the rich to inherit their privilege,
even as it makes it harder for the hardest working children of workers to
enter into college. In an era of increasing inequality and injustice, it is
not surprising that the Voting Rights Act itself would be at risk. It is
time to march once more. You might not have been able to be at the March on
Washington in 1963. You might not have been alive during the Selma March of
1965. But you don't want to miss the Keep the Vote Alive march in Atlanta on
August 6.
.
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