#Voting Rights Quotes

“We must have our freedom now. We must have the right to vote. We must have equal protection of the law.”

“Even when the polls are open to all, Negroes have shown themselves too slow to exercise their voting privileges. There must be a concerted effort on the part of Negro leaders to arouse their people from their apathetic indifference.... In the past, apathy was a moral failure. Today, it is a form of moral and political suicide.”

“So long as I do not firmly and irrevocably possess the right to vote I do not possess myself. I cannot make up my mind - it is made up for me. I cannot live as a democratic citizen, observing the laws I have helped to enact - I can only submit to the edict of others.”

“There are more Negroes in jail with me than there are on the voting rolls.”

“Imagine that -- a country that's supposed to be a democracy, supposed to be for freedom and all of that kind of stuff when they want to draft you and put you in the army and send you to Saigon to fight for them -- and then you've got to turn around and all night long discuss how you're going to just get a right to register and vote without being murdered. Why, that's the most hypocritical government since the world began!”

“People must understand that people were beaten, arrested, jailed, and some people were murdered, while attempting to register to vote, or to get others to register to vote.”

“When I was growing up in rural Alabama, it was impossible for me to register to vote. I didn't become a registered voter until I moved to Tennessee, to Nashville, as a student.”

“Some of us gave a little blood for the right to participate in the democratic process.”

“Black men and women were not allowed to register to vote. My own mother, my own father, my grandfather and my uncles and aunts could not register to vote because each time they attempted to register to vote, they were told they could not pass the literacy test.”

“For a person [like John Lewis] that is a champion of voter rights to question whether or not Donald Trump legitimately won an election or not is an incredible position to take five days before an inauguration.”

“To make it hard, to make it difficult almost impossible for people to cast a vote is not in keeping with the democratic process.”

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

“With effort we can protect the foundation of our democracy, for which so many marched across this bridge, the right to vote.”

“[E]very Man who comes among us, and takes up a piece of Land, becomes a Citizen, and by our Constitution has a Voice in Elections, and a share in the Government of the Country.”

“Citizenship means standing up for everyone's right to vote.***”

“Grace Bell lived in Belhaven, North Carolina her entire life, all 100 years of her life. Just a few weeks ago Republicans challenged her voter registration status and tried to remove her from the voter rolls. Now Grace got her voter registration reinstated. And you better believe she`s going to vote. But this 100-year old woman wasn`t alone in being targeted. The list of voters Republicans tried to purge was two-thirds black and Democratic. That didn`t happen by accident.”