During the summer of 1968, the 50-year-old civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer delivered a powerful speech on American democracy before a mostly white audience in Kentucky. In Hamer’s vision, all Americans committed to social justice needed to address the unfinished work of building democracy. “We have a grave problem that’s facing us today in this country and if we’re going to make democracy a reality, we better start working now,” she declared. White Americans could not simply sit on the sidelines or wait for progress to happen. They too needed to join the fight to save the nation. “It’s time for us to wake up,” Hamer advised members of the audience.
We have a grave problem that’s facing us today in this country and if we’re going to make democracy a reality, we better start working now.
Hamer’s call for Americans to “wake up” is just as urgent today as it was then. Despite the legal gains of the modern Civil Rights Movement — namely, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1968 — the United States still fails to live up to the ideals of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” On the surface, there exists a veneer of equal voting access that might send the message that all Americans hold some political power. A more detailed and honest examination of the United States — devoid of idealism and ideas of American exceptionalism — reveals a nation in need of urgent transformation.
Some of the social ills Hamer confronted during her lifetime remain with us today: voter suppression, economic inequality and state-sanctioned violence, to name just a few. The attacks on our voting rights exacerbate the issues we face. In 2013, the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder greatly weakened the 1965 Voting Rights Act by undermining the use of preclearance — the process by which the federal government reviewed proposed changes to election law in states and counties that…
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