-I brought my mother to vote
at the Southside Homes Community Center
only to have been told after 60 years of voting that she
had been purged from the system.
Even as the coronavirus raises new questions about the safety of voting,
some Black Americans say they are encountering obstacles
that remind them of the past.
-I cannot come to grips with it, that my mother, my own mother,
cannot vote after all that she’s been through.
She came through the civil rights era.
She said, I have gone through many years where
I could not vote.
I want to vote, Cynthia.
The right to vote was hard won for African-American women in
particular, who played a significant and sometimes
overlooked role in a struggle that cut across both the suffrage
and civil rights movements.
And they remain at the forefront of
the fight to expand access to the ballot today.
-You got to make sure you go vote.
Sheila Tyson works with girls in Birmingham, Alabama, on civics
education and political engagement.
-We introduce them to the, the whole history of voting, how the
statehouse is ran, how do you pass a bill?
How do you get your brother, your church member, to
actually participate in the voting system?
-So, we’re going to register you guys to vote today.
-We are educating people, and letting them know the importance
of using voting to exercise your right to state your opinion and
have a say-so in your everyday life.
-My grandmamma quoted, she said when you invest, when you invest
and educate a man, you have educated a man,
but when you invest and educate a woman,
you have educated a nation.
The work of the Birmingham students is rooted in a tradition
of activism by African-American women who came before them.
-These are women who have a long history working together, going
all the way back to the Civil War, some of them.
They come out of a distinct history, a history that is not
captured in a narrative about women’s suffrage associations.
-The long fight was officially over.
The campaign for women’s suffrage celebrated the ratification of the
19th Amendment in 1920.
-The suffrage movement was a long story of hard work and heartaches
but it was crowned by victory.
But that victory was not felt equally among all women.
-My grandmother was born in 1919, the year that women were given the
right, uh, to vote.
However, she’s African-American and lived in Louisiana.
She did not cast a ballot until the 1960s.
-African-American women, even after a constitutional amendment,
will still be disenfranchised by state laws, by poll taxes, by
grandfather clauses, by understanding tests,
by whites-only primary.
So Black women turned to their own networks, including those
formed through Black women’s clubs, which had been organizing for
decades on voting rights and other campaigns like anti-lynching.
And now, they dug in.
-So, how do you pay your poll tax?
How do you confront an official who imposes on you
a literacy test?
This is the on-the-ground work that has to happen in order
for Black women to see the results of women’s suffrage in a
meaningful way.
-We was met in Indianola by policemen, highway patrolmen,
and they only allowed two of us in
to take the literacy test at the time.
Women like Fannie Lou Hamer, Septima Clark and Diane Nash
carried that fight forward into the civil rights era, facing
violence and imprisonment in the process.
It wasn’t until the country was forced to come face-to-face with
the reality of what Black Americans were experiencing that things
began to change.
-Hundreds of marchers heading to the state Capitol in Montgomery to
protest restrictions on Black voting were brutally beaten
by sheriff’s deputies on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
-America could no longer deny what was really going on.
To see the utter brutality, I think shocked
the conscience of the country in a way.
After the violence in Selma, President Johnson signed the
Voting Rights Act into law in 1965.
It outlawed barriers like literacy tests and put places with a history of
discrimination under federal oversight.
-Since the passage of the 1965 voting rights bill, close to one
million citizens in seven states have been given the most basic
right of citizenship: the vote.
-Negro voter registration in 11 deep Southern states has
increased 50 percent since the 1964 election.
The new law meant that Daniels’ grandmother voted for the first time,
and that more Black officials would be elected to office,
including her father.
-My father was the first Black elected to the police jury in our
parish, in Winn Parish, Louisiana.
And he was able to enter that election and certainly to get elected
because of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
And later, the Voting Rights Act
came to play a role in Daniels’ own life,
when she began working in the
Department of Justice’s voting section,
which was responsible for enforcing voting laws across the country.
-There was continuing work around
ensuring that particularly people of color in the South
had free, fair, non-discriminatory access to the ballot.
The Voting Rights Act required states with a history of
discrimination to get federal approval for any voting changes to
ensure they were fair to minority voters.
Daniels remembers one time when they intervened to stop a
polling station from being moved to a particular building.
-The place it was being moved to used to be the place where the Klan
met, where the Ku Klux Klan met.
Certainly, elderly African-Americans would not enter
into this building to cast a ballot or for any other reason because of the
reminders of the historical past and because of the, the discrimination
and pain, right, that existed in that building.
But nearly 50 years after the Voting Rights Act was passed...
-Shelby County, Alabama, says the law has outlived its time.
...a Supreme Court decision undercut a crucial section of the act,
effectively freeing states from that federal oversight.
John Merrill, Alabama’s Secretary of State,
says the time had come.
-The days that we have had in the past in Alabama and other states in
the union where people have attempted to take advantage of
individuals by making it more difficult for them to participate
in the process are long gone.
Merrill defends the state’s law requiring a photo ID to vote,
saying it can combat fraud.
But multiple studies of voting across the country have found
such fraud to be extremely rare.
And opponents of voter ID laws say they disproportionately impact
people of color, the elderly, and low-income voters.
Merrill disagrees.
-Nobody’s doing more than we are to make it easy for people to
participate in the process.
While some states have embraced reforms, like automatic voter
registration, many others have made it harder to vote.
-Moving polling places, closing polling places, purging voter rolls are
all things that are now being done without, um, federal approval and
we’re seeing the shrinking of the right to vote.
Now, with the coronavirus making the safety of polling places an issue,
there’s a new push to expand the right to vote: by mail.
But that’s being fought by conservative groups.
-State and federal officials now rethinking how to hold
an election during an outbreak.
-Covid-19 is exposing fault lines that already existed in many areas
of the country in regards to inequities that exist.
The fight to vote has always been about power,
who has it and who can get it.
Meanwhile, Black women have shown a powerful commitment
to voting over the years, and they’ve
emerged as a formidable force in elections.
-It’s all about making people aware
of what’s going on in their community.
They want to vote.
But when you lose all hope and you
don’t feel like your vote count, you’ve got to make people
understand you can control what actually goes on in your community.
In March, thousands gathered in Selma at the Edmund Pettus Bridge
to commemorate the 55th anniversary of Bloody Sunday.
Sheila Tyson brought young women from her student group to be there
for the event.
They plan to keep registering voters and getting
people to vote ahead of the election.
-Black women, we are strong and we are hard workers and it’s worth
the fight.
It’s worth the work that we have to put in to make sure that
everyone have a equal right to vote.