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A Transformative Election

Posted by: Ron Pollack, Executive Director, Families USA on Nov 05, 2008

The election we witnessed yesterday was not simply historic - it was truly transformative.

Just 43 years ago, Congress passed, and President Lyndon Johnson signed, the Voting Rights Act. For decades, since the end of Reconstruction, voting for many in the states of the old Confederacy was an act of unmatched heroism. To vote was to lose a job - even the laborious job of chopping and picking cotton for a meager $3 a day. To vote was to have your house shot into in the dark of night. To vote was to risk, and for too many to lose, one's life.

The Voting Rights Act was borne out of the heroism of many. Most visibly, it was catapulted onto the national agenda by the hundreds of brave souls, led by John Lewis in March of 1965, who crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge leaving Selma, Alabama east on Route 80 to march towards Montgomery. As they crossed the bridge, they were brutally assaulted by police and highway patrolmen on horseback. They were beaten but not defeated.

Dr. Martin Luther King re-started the march soon thereafter. Thousands marched with him, sleeping in the fields at night. Singing their defiance of then-Governor George Wallace, they chanted:

            Wallace, you never can jail us all,

            Wallace, segregation's going to fall!

And they made it triumphantly to Montgomery. At night, after the final speeches were over near the State Capitol, Viola Liuzzo - a then-unknown civil rights activist who participated in the march - was murdered.

In the first election in Mississippi after the Voting Rights Act, a number of brave heroes decided to run for local office: sheriff, county board of education, mayor, county supervisor. They knew they wouldn't win, but they were undaunted.

I remember in the all-black town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi - in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, in the poorest part of our nation - black leaders assembled in houses before the elections, not knowing what violence they would face. Some had guns and other weapons to protect themselves and their families; others, more schooled and adherent to Dr. King's admonitions of non-violence, simply brought their bodies and heroic determination to vote for the first time.

Now, only four-plus decades later, we have witnessed an election that no one could realistically have dreamed about during those dark and difficult days. President-Elect Barack Obama's triumph - more profoundly, the triumph of our nation - is, in no small part, the victory of so many people who risked all they had to work for a better day.

For those of us fortunate to see, and participate in, this transformative election, our work must continue and start anew. This election is an opportunity - an opportunity to bring fairness and decency and dignity for those who have yet to share our nation's bounty. It is only the achievement of such justice that will enable us to realize Dr. King's dream: "Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we're free at last."