19 October 2014 BECAUSE THEY MARCHED: THE PEOPLE’S CAMPAIGN FOR VOTING RIGHTS THAT CHANGED AMERICA by Russell Freedman, Holiday House, August 2014, 96p., ISBN: 978-0-8234-2921-9

“The potential magnitude of racially discriminatory voter disenfranchisement counseled hesitation before disturbing the District Court’s findings and final judgement...The greatest threat to public confidence in elections in this case is the prospect of enforcing a purposefully discriminatory law, one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters.”

--U.S Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, October 18, 2014, dissenting in Veasey v. Perry, a Texas voter ID case.  The seeds for Veasey were sown in 2013 when the U.S Supreme Court struck down key elements of the landmark 1965 Voting Act in a controversial 5-4 decision.

“By the middle of February [1965], nearly 3,400 demonstrators had been arrested, filling up the jails and several prison work camps in the area. Meanwhile, efforts by protest leaders to influence public opinion were beginning to pay off. A congressional delegation had traveled to Selma to investigate the mass arrests and determine if new legislation was needed to ensure voting rights. And President Lyndon B. Johnson had held a press conference to deliver a statement in support of voting rights. ‘All Americans should be indignant when one American is denied the right to vote,’ he told reporters.

‘The loss of that right undermines the freedom of every citizen.’”

-- from BECAUSE THEY MARCHED

I will spend next Saturday morning at San Francisco’s City Hall, training to supervise a voting precinct. Then, on Election Day, I will spend 16 hours serving as a poll inspector in someone’s garage, one of the many neighborhood voting places here in San Francisco.

Government affects our lives in millions of ways. Those who participate in choosing government representatives and deciding on ballot propositions have a hand in making the rules that affect all of us, so the right to vote is a big deal.

Voting began as a right that was granted only to land-owning white men. A significant part of our national history has involved those who haven’t been permitted to participate and their allies struggling against those who have sought to deny voting rights to women, black people, Latinos, and poor people,

BECAUSE THEY MARCHED is the story of the struggle that led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and includes such incidents as the police terrorism at the Pettus Bridge and the march from Selma to Montgomery. We learn how, during the sixties, people like Viola Liuzzo were murdered for trying to secure voting rights for themselves and others.

Russell Freedman sets this struggle amid the larger civil rights movement by introducing many of the significant events of the movement through text and well-known images. It’s an intense story because Freedman conveys so much of this history by quoting the words of participants on both sides of the struggle.

“It is because they marched that I stand before you today.”

-- President Barack Obama in 2007 speaking in Selma at the forty-second anniversary of the march from Selma to Montgomery.

BECAUSE THEY MARCHED commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, showing young people the struggle of those who were denied the right to vote. Unlike some other struggles on the road to equality in America, this fight continues. The book concludes with an epilogue that summarizes the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby v. Holder decision which struck down key sections of the Voting Rights Act. Freedman notes:

“Immediately after the decision, some states and counties in the South announced that they would take advantage of the ruling to make legal changes in voting requirements--such as strict voter ID laws--that, critics say, would make it harder for minority voters, older people, students, legal immigrants, and the poor of all races to register and vote.”

That leads to this weekend’s news about Veasey v. Perry.

In her dissent of the 2013 Shelby decision, Justice Ginsburg likened the struggle for voting rights to the ancient Greek myth of fighting the Hydra. “Whenever one form of voting discrimination was identified and prohibited, others sprang up in its place.”

One hundred fifty years ago, former slaves were granted the right to vote through enactment of the Civil War amendments. As we see in BECAUSE THEY MARCHED, that right to vote only began to become a reality in 1965. From the perspective of the Supreme Court’s latest decision this weekend, these current and ongoing struggles for equality and voting rights make BECAUSE THEY MARCHED a powerful read and must-have resource.

Richie Partington, MLIS

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