Lest we forget (11/7/2006)

On November 18 she was arrested at home, handcuffed and taken to a dingy little room where fugitive slaves had been interrogated and then returned to their masters. A preliminary hearing was set for November 29, at which the Commissioner concluded she had probably violated the law and ordered her into the custody of a deputy marshall. She refused to post bail and wanted to take her case to the Supreme Court. Her lawyer petitioned the district judge to issue a writ of habeas corpus for her release from jail; the judge refused and instead doubled her bail. Her attorney, not wanting her to stay in jail, posted bail with his own money. The crime? It was 1872 and Susan B. Anthony had dared to vote. On January 24, 1873, a grand jury of 20 men indicted her for “knowingly, wrongfully, and unlawfully voting for a member of Congress without having a lawful right to vote,…the said Susan B. Anthony being then and there a person of the female sex.”

With her trial scheduled for May, she spent the next 4 months on a speaking tour asking, “Is it a crime for a citizen of the United States to vote?” At the trial, the judge directed the jury to find her guilty. In an opinion apparently prepared before the trial started, he declared: “The Fourteenth Amendment gives no right to a woman to vote and the voting by Miss Anthony was in violation of the law.” Her sentence was a stiff fine, which she refused to pay, and the government made no effort to collect. Finally, in 1920, 14 years after Susan B. Anthony’s death and 52 years of suffragist campaigns, the 19th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, granting women the right to vote, was ratified.

White men always have had the right to vote in this country. But men of color did not win that right until 1870, when the fifteenth amendment to the U. S. Constitution was ratified. But having the right to vote, and actually being able to exercise it, has been and continues to be challenged. In 1964 Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, were brutally tortured and murdered on a lonely Mississippi road. Why? They had worked in Freedom Summer, an intensive voter-registration drive in the South. During that summer, black and white civil rights workers and leaders as well as ordinary black citizens were threatened, attacked and killed as a broad coalition of white Southerners tried to disenfranchise blacks.

The stories of the three young men and of Susan B. Anthony are only two about the thousands of heroes who fought to extend voting rights to all U.S. citizens, regardless of color or sex.

Voting is our best opportunity and most powerful way to express ourselves. But the struggle to vote goes on. There still are some who try to disenfranchise us and to rig elections. They use unwarranted rules and restrictions to prevent registration; they illegally purge voters from the rolls; they distribute threatening letters and wrong information about poll locations; they compromise the integrity of voting machines and manipulate vote recounts. We must not allow them to disenfranchise us. To paraphrase Susan B. Anthony, as she was denied her right to vote: when we are robbed of the fundamental privilege of citizenship, we are degraded from the status of a citizen to that of a subject and doomed to political subjection.

Today is Election Day. Exercise your citizenship. Vote.

- Judith Kohler

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