After a hard-hitting speech by President Biden and a dramatic debate on the floor of the Senate, lawmakers failed to approve federal voting rights legislation in January. Since then the national political debate has moved on to the president’s social spending plan, a Supreme Court vacancy and, within recent days, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
LaTosha Brown and Cliff Albright, co-founders of Black Voters Matter who have led protests in Washington and around the country, are determined to keep the issue of voting rights in the conversation. In fact, they argue, the rights of people to cast ballots for the candidates and issues of their choice is inextricably linked to the most pressing issues in the country today.
“Voting rights is not a separate issue; it relates to all those other things: whether we decide to go to war, the economy, the Supreme Court,” Brown said in a recent interview. “The bottom line is voting is foundational to every single one of those issues. What we’re talking about right now is a democracy — that’s the fight we’re talking about.”
This weekend marks the 57th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” when activists marching for voting rights were brutally beaten by Alabama state troopers as they tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., en route to the state’s capital in Montgomery. The images of the carnage on March 7, 1965, are credited with moving President Lyndon B. Johnson to push Congress into passing the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
That law, one of the most significant legislative victories for Black Americans, has been weakened during the past decade by a series of rulings by the Supreme Court. In response, states led by Republican legislatures and governors have passed a barrage of laws that activists and some experts say disproportionately restrict access to voting for people of color, young people and low-income people.
Activists from around the country have lobbied the Senate to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would bolster the original 1965 law, and the Freedom to Vote Act, which would set some federal standards for how elections are run and would also address fundraising practices. Republicans have repeatedly blocked the bills, and Democrats have been unable to convince two senators to make an exception to the filibuster and allow the legislation to pass by a simple majority.
On Sunday, Vice President Harris will speak at the event marking the anniversary of Bloody Sunday and participate in the march across the bridge along with activists and other political leaders, including some Cabinet officials and members of Congress.
Albright and Brown will spend the upcoming week with other activists to complete the march to Montgomery, hosting several events along the route to raise awareness about voting rights.
Alabama continues to be at the center of the fight for voting rights. The Supreme Court decision that took away the Justice Department’s oversight of voting laws in states with a history of voter discrimination was a result of a case filed in Shelby County, Ala. And in February, the Supreme Court overruled a lower court order that Alabama lawmakers create a second congressional district favorable to a Black candidate to comply with the Voting Rights Act. Only one of Alabama’s seven congressional districts is majority-Black, even though African Americans make up nearly 27 percent of the state’s population. Rep. Terri A. Sewell (D) represents the 7th District and is the lone Democrat in the state’s congressional delegation.
“You can’t have a people’s agenda as long as you’ve got a Congress and a government that doesn’t accurately reflect the people. And that’s the situation that we’re in right now,” Albright said. He said activists are sometimes dismissed as being overly dramatic when they say voting is “a matter of life or death.” But he said the debate over how U.S. leaders respond to the growing conflict in Ukraine, as well as the ongoing efforts to deal with the coronavirus are serious threats to the country.
“Who makes those decisions, which are literally life or death decisions, is a matter of our voting rights and about our voting power and to what extent the people in government, whether on the executive or legislative level, actually reflects the people in the country,” Albright said.
Which is why Brown said it’s important for people to think about voting rights beyond just the simple process of casting a ballot in one election.
“We’re trying to shift the very culture of how we think about democracy. We want people thinking about it as a tool for self-determination, just as we think about our livelihoods every single day, just as we think about how we feed ourselves and provide shelter. We want people to think about their power in that same kind of way.”

