By Genoa Barrow | OBSERVER Senior Staff Writer
From poll taxes to grandfather clauses and literacy tests to modern day intimidation, barriers have long existed to keep African Americans from having the right and power of the vote.
Part history lesson, part call to action, advocates and lawmakers shared their divergent voting education origin stories as part of a recent discussion marking the 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Secretary of State Dr. Shirley N. Weber hosted the panel last week, under the theme of “Celebrating Progress, Strengthening Democracy.”
“We want to remind folks of what the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is,” Weber said. “Those who lived through it understood the fight and why it was so very important for us to have it.”
Although the 15th Amendment granted Black men the right to vote in 1870, most African Americans in the South were effectively still prevented from voting due to widespread disenfranchisement. Only a small number of Black men in the North were able to vote, but even there they faced discrimination.
Black women technically got the right to vote in 1920 with the 19th Amendment, but discriminatory state laws and intimidation tactics prevented most, particularly in the South, from casting ballots until the passage of the Voting Rights Act 45 years later.
The fight for Black Americans’ right to vote was perilous, as individuals faced violence, intimidation, and even murder for exercising their political voice. Weber told the assembled audience that she knew going into office in 2021 that voting rights were under attack.
“The question was always, ‘Are we as strong as our ancestors?’, ” she said. “Are we able to fight like they fought to maintain the right to vote and to exercise that right in going to the polls?”
The former assemblymember often shared her long history with voting. Her father, a Southern sharecropper, moved their family to Los Angeles to escape certain death after he spoke up for himself at a weigh station.
“A man hit him and he hit him back. The man refused to pay him … and he refused to take less than what he was owed. As a result, they made a plan to lynch my father and his family had to sneak him out of Arkansas in the middle of the night.”
One of the first things her parents did when they got to California was to register to vote.
“My father was adamant about his right to vote, his right to be heard, his right to have dignity,” Weber said.
When there was nowhere to cast ballots in their neighborhood, her mother volunteered their home as a polling place. Weber and her siblings got an early introduction to the power of voting and actively participating in change.
“I knew every election Los Angeles had because our house was the polling place. People used to call (my mother) the ‘Voting Lady.’ We grew up with that. We also grew up in Arkansas and saw what was happening – the lack of opportunity, the lack of the right to vote, the subservient behavior that people were a part of. Eventually that changed, but that was very much a part of my cousins’ and relatives’ perspectives, but my dad refused to have it and he fought.
“He was denied a lot of things in life, but he was sure of the fact that he was going to vote every election and he did until the day he died.”
Author and educator Dr. Melba Patillo Beals, who joined the panel virtually, can also remember a time before Blacks were allowed to vote freely.
Patillo Beals and eight other Black students, known as the Little Rock Nine, were confronted daily by white mobs in 1957, while integrating an Arkansas high school. It wasn’t the first time she experienced racial violence.
“I’m now 82 years of age,” she said. “Understand that I did see this country at a time when we could not vote.”
The “Warriors Don’t Cry” and “White is a State of Mind” author recalls being a child, holding her grandmother’s hand as she attempted to vote. “We got to the place where we were told that white people were voting only. These guys started throwing beer cans at her. I remember that distinctly.”
Unlike Weber, fellow panelist and iconic California politician Willie Brown didn’t have an early introduction to voting in his native Texas.
“I don’t remember until coming to California at 17 years of age, anybody in Minneola, on the Black side, voting or even talking about voting,” said Brown, the former Assembly speaker and mayor of San Francisco. “There was no such thing as the NAACP. There was no such thing as the church movement that advocated for voting. That just was not part of any of the agenda.”
It was 1951 and Brown was attending what was then San Francisco State College. He met fellow freshman John Burton, who would go on to serve in Congress and lead the California Democratic Party. Burton, Brown says, encouraged him to become politically aware and active.
“I quickly became familiar with the idea of voting, and with the idea of doing more than voting,” Brown said. Obtaining equal education for Black youth and equal rights as a whole became his focal point.
“That was part of the conversation almost from the first day that I entered college in San Francisco at the age of 17 and from that moment on, it was the question of, ‘What else is there that I don’t have, that I am entitled to, that we are going to go get, and so from 17 on, the focus was on equality, and it wasn’t just on voting. It was on every aspect of equality, on every aspect, period,” said Brown, now an elder statesman at age 91.
Persistent Challenges
Today, barriers to voting still persist. During the 2020 presidential election, voters reported seeing armed individuals near vote tabulation centers in Arizona and Nevada. During the 2022 midterm elections, armed individuals in tactical gear gathered near ballot drop boxes in Arizona, leading to a lawsuit alleging voter intimidation.
Black voters were also reportedly purposefully targeted with misinformation through social media prior to the 2024 presidential campaign, in an effort to sway votes or keep them from being engaged.
Other barriers include gerrymandering, the practice of manipulating voting district boundaries; voter ID laws, which require specific forms of photo identification; and felony disenfranchisement, as many states restrict the voting rights of people with felony convictions, even after they have served their time.
Adam Cain, a formerly incarcerated organizer now with Initiate Justice, shared his insights.
“What a lot of people don’t really know or understand about people that are incarcerated are very, very, very actively involved in democracy because of the prison politics that they learn from watching on TV,” Cain said. “Once I learned that, I was like, ‘OK, this is how I can get involved and then Initiate Justice came around and we just continue to push and to make change and open up other voting rights for people that are coming home.”
Cain served nearly 15 years before paroling in 2020. While incarcerated, he helped work on and spread awareness of Prop. 57, which expanded parole consideration for individuals convicted of nonviolent felonies and Prop. 17, which was passed in 2020, restoring voting rights for individuals on parole for a felony conviction.
“We do a lot of organizing,” Cain said. “We use an inside, outside approach, working from the bottom to the top, bottom, meaning everyday people speaking and connecting with senators, assembly members, mayors, etc. … It’s just connecting with the people and getting them involved.”
Cain and others often hear young people expressing a disconnect from voting and how they don’t see their votes matter – something that Patillo Beals finds hard to grasp.
“I came up in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1940,” she said. “That was ugly, so there’s no chance that I don’t want to vote. I don’t understand why people don’t understand how relevant voting is to their existence yesterday, today and tomorrow.”
Just as Black Americans fought to obtain the right to vote, leaders argue that they must fight just as hard to keep it. In 2013, while the nation’s first Black president was in office, the Supreme Court struck down a key piece of the Voting Rights Act, ending federal oversight over states that had a history of discrimination.
“We’re not going to enjoy democracy in this country unless somehow 100 percent of the people who are 18 years of age have registered to vote and in fact, show up,” Brown said.
“The Voter Rights Act does not command that, period. High school graduation doesn’t command that, period. We, the people, need to demand that of ourselves and of our relatives and our friends and of our acquaintances, because, believe me, when the poll tax was put in place, it was to keep us from voting. All of the barriers that have been created in organizations at the governmental level were designed to remove whatever privilege you are getting from the Voting Rights Act.”
The panel discussion on the landmark legislation was followed by tours of a tribute exhibit with photos and memorabilia from the state of California’s special archives.