By Rodney Beard
In 1965, the practice of state disenfranchisement related to the right of all people to vote, especially minorities in the South, took its toll. Voting-rights activists had been brutally murdered by the Ku Klux Klan, other race hate groups, and yes, even law enforcement. Many others were beaten, wounded, and jailed for simply exercising their right First Amendment right of peaceful dialogue to rectify a law that was unconstitutional.
On March 7th 1965 a group of peaceful protesters were crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma en route to the state capitol in Montgomery, Alabama when they were brutally attacked by none other than the State Police, for no reason whatsoever. Well, because of this gross display of racial hatred and disrespect for social justice, President Johnson and Congress decided that enough was enough and did something about it. They did something we don’t see any more in government (Congress), they moved swiftly to correct an issue of social injustice, and the President signed the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965 within 5 months and 1 day of that atrocity.
By 1975 Congress had introduced amendments to deal with the issues of gerrymandering, annexations, and at-large elections, which all promoted and undergirded voting discrimination against not just newly registered Blacks, but Asians, Native Americans and Hispanics. None of this would have happened if Blacks, Whites, and Browns had not remained committed to social justice for all of “we the people.” We had come a long way, but the work was not over.
In November 1975 Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes released an album entitled “Wake Up Everybody” that is, as I look back, a 39 year old message that keeps on giving even today. Could it be prophetic or is it one of the most cautionary tales of our time?
“Wake up everybody no more sleepin in bed…No more backward thinkin time for thinkin ahead
The world has changed so very much, from what it used to be so there is so much hatred war an’ poverty”
“The world won’t get no better if we just let it be…the world won’t get no better we gotta change it yeah, just you and me.”
Never have truer words been spoken or sung, but what does a 39 year old song have to do with you and me right now? Well, I guess that would be a rhetorical question in that we already know the answer to it, right?
Let me put it to you this way…it’s time to wake up and smell the political, racial, and socially offensive coffee brewing all over this country by the “next minority.” The mid-term elections will soon be upon us and it’s time to help inform, educate, and activate those who don’t understand what is at stake and therefore have the most to lose.
We need to wake up and become clearly aware of “their” agenda for the middle-class which is to destroy it and you along with it by taking over the Senate, and in every other election in November. It’s time to wake up and understand that the rights of voters should never be challenged as they are and we need to put an end to their racist machinations.
It’s time to get out of our beds of complacency, and into the streets of political and social activism. It’s time to think ahead of the powers that be who would deny anyone the constitutional right to vote, healthcare, education, and even food. They have gerrymandered, annexed enough districts, cut services, denied basic human rights, and stolen enough elections already. But if “we” all come together we can shut them down where it hurts the most, at the ballot box. We then overcome, and our policies prevail. Voting is not a privilege or option in just society, it is our responsibility. Look how many gave their lives for our rights.
It is time we teach our kids in a “new way,” the way we were, by teaching them their civic, spiritual, and social duties, letting them see us exercising ours openly, and educating “them the very best we can” to the fact that one day the “world will be in their hands.” Let’s commit to get them ready for what God already has ready for them without delay because the “world has changed so very much from what it used to be” as racism, hate, sexism, and discrimination on every level is more apparent than it was in 1965.
We don’t have to wait for our change to come; we can create the change right now. Let’s not wait until November to get started, let’s start right now! Join us.
Enough is enough! Wake up everybody, let’s all go, and let’s all VOTE!
Rodney Beard
pastorbeard@comcast.net