Should voting be Mandatory?

President Barack Obama on Wednesday suggested the U.S. take a page from Australia’s book and make voting mandatory. Speaking at an event in Cleveland, Ohio, the president said, "If everybody voted, then it would completely change the political map in this country,” and it would “counteract money more than anything.”
"Today is a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield."
- President Lyndon Baines Johnson, August 6, 1965, at the signing of the Voting Rights Act

The Voting Rights Act aimed to overcome legal barriers at the state and local levels that prevented African Americans from exercising their right to vote under the 15th Amendment (1870) to the Constitution of the United States.

Someone our Children's Should Know, Learn, and Read About: Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer

Fannie Lou Hamer

Fannie Lou Hamer was an voting rights activist, civil rights leader, and philanthropist. She was instrumental in organizing Mississippi’s Freedom Summer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and later became the vice-chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

Hamer did not write any books, but many have been written about her. Most of us are aware of the impassioned testimony Hamer gave at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. But Hamer also gave speeches at the 1968 and 1972 conventions, and even spoke with Malcolm X in Harlem.

Who is Edmund Pettus and What is the Selma to Montgomery Marches?

Edmund Pettus served as chairman of the state delegation to the Democratic National Convention for more than two decades. In 1877, Pettus was named Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, during the final year of Reconstruction^.]

Fifty years ago, on March 7, 1965, hundreds of people gathered in Selma, Alabama to march to the capital city of Montgomery. They marched to ensure that Blacks could exercise their constitutional right to vote — even in the face of a segregationist system that wanted to make it impossible.
On the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, state troopers and county members violently attacked the marchers, leaving many of them injured and bloodied — and some of them unconscious.
But the marchers didn't stop. Two days later, Dr. Martin Luther King led roughly 2,500 people back to the Pettus Bridge before turning the marchers around — obeying a court order that prevented them from making the full march.
The third march started on March 21, with protection from 1,000 military policemen and 2,000 Army troops. Thousands of people joined along the way to Montgomery, with roughly 25,000 people entering the capital on the final leg of the march. On March 25, the marchers made it to the entrance of the Alabama State Capitol building, with a petition for Gov. George Wallace.
Only a few months later, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, which President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law on August 6, 1965. The Voting Rights Act was designed to eliminate legal barriers at the state and local level that prevented Blacks from exercising their right to vote under the 15th Amendment — after nearly a century of unconstitutional discrimination.

Look how far we have come with, we, Black Americans is the only group who freed ourselves with no army, no guns, no military, and no war....just the belief and faith that God is still on the throne and injustice any where is a threat to justice everywhere....we are free and if we keep believing one day all people will be equal under the law.

Free but not Equal? Are we going back?

Now we are free. What do we want? We want education; we want protection; we want plenty of work; we want good pay for it, but not any more or less than any one else...and then you will see the down-trodden race rise up.

—John Adams, a former slave   Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot. —Frederick Douglass, 1865 We went every day about nine o’clock, with our books wrapped in paper to prevent the police or white persons from seeing them...After school we left the same way we entered, one by one, when we would go to the square about a block from school, and wait for each other. —Susie King, who attended a secret school in Savannah, Georgia Have we really actually been free?