Jason Kander Quotes

Too many people struggled, suffered, and died to make it possible for every American to exercise their right to vote.

The Ballot or the Bullet

In my home county—Lowndes County, Alabama--in 1964 Blacks were 80 percent of the population. Not one Black was registered to vote—Not one!!!

It was the biggest suppression of voting rights in our country's history since Jim Crow. And the thread of race runs from the beginning to the end of my book.

Voting discrimination still exists. Nobody doubts that.

We've got a larger than usual police force. Its twice as big as any city of our size. They [Blacks attempting to vote] won't have a chance.

The 3rd leg of the strategy for GOP political supremacy has been to suppress the vote of the Democrat’s most loyal base: African Americans. On the fallacious pretext of addressing voter fraud, Republican officials in more than two dozen states introduced and passed new voting laws that that restrict voting. The most immediate impact of these laws has been to disproportionately disenfranchise Black, Latino and young voters.

Civil rights leaders, including my husband and Albert Turner, have fought long and hard to achieve free and unfettered access to the ballot box. Mr. Sessions has used the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens in the district he now seeks to serve as a federal judge.

I'd been in jail, and I'd been beat. I had been to a voter registration workshop, you know, to - they were just training and teaching us how to register, to pass the literacy test.

I was forced away from the plantation because I wouldn't go back and withdraw, you know, my literacy test after I had tried to take it. I wouldn't go back.

In Selma, Alabama, in 1965, only 2.1 percent of blacks of voting age were registered to vote. The only place you could attempt to register was to go down to the courthouse. You had to pass a so-called literacy test. And they would tell people over and over again that they didn't or couldn't pass the literacy test.

As long as there have been elections, there have been attempts to keep eligible people from voting.

Men and women in my lifetime have died fighting for the right to vote: people like James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were murdered while registering black voters in Mississippi in 1964, and Viola Liuzzo, who was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1965 during the Selma march for voting rights.

When people discuss the 1960s and the great Civil Rights Era, they often speak in romantic terms as if there wasn't immense work put in, and as if there wasn't immense sacrifice that took place. But none of those battles were easily fought and won; there were sustained movements behind them.

Since the birth of our Nation, no other right has been more important than having the ability to vote. Unfortunately, as history has shown, the denial of this right to minorities is a scar on our system of democracy.

Negroes could not vote in those days. When I went to Massachusetts and ran for office, it was the first time in my life that I ever voted.

The right to vote ... depends on the legislation of the various States

Bad government is made in the poling places of this country.

It seems to me there has been some systematic disenfranchisement of voters … because people haven’t cared enough to spend the money to have good voting systems and voter education.

The marked decrease in the average vote for congressmen in the South, from 1892 to 1902, is due primarily to the limitations upon the suffrage, and that these limitations were intended to eliminate the negro vote.

Particularly in the South, efforts continue to be made to deny blacks access to the polls, even where blacks constitute the majority of the voters.

The most significant civil rights problem is voting. Each citizen's right to vote is fundamental to all the other rights of citizenship and the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 make it the responsibility of the Department of Justice to protect that right.

We have a problem with our democracy when you have election officials deliberately trying to take away the fundamental right to vote in this country in the 21st century.

Alabama and other states had a terrible record in terms of depriving people of their right to vote, making it difficult for them to vote, discriminating against people.

From making it harder to register and stay on the rolls to moving and closing polling places to rejecting lawful ballots, we can no longer ignore these threats to democracy.