Obama Appeals To Congress To Restore Voting Rights Act
On the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, President Obama urged the Congress to restore the historic 1965 law, removing legal barriers that prevented African-Americans from exercising their right to vote, according to yahoo.
"Our state leaders and legislatures must make it easier - not harder - for more Americans to have their voices heard," Obama wrote in a letter to the New York Times Magazine published online Wednesday. The president said he was "inspired" by Jim Rutenberg's August 2 cover story, "A Dream Undone: Inside the 50-year campaign to roll back the Voting Rights Act."
He wrote that the Voting Rights Act had stopped literacy tests as well as more kinds of discrimination, "helping to close the gap between our promise that all of us are created equal and our long history of denying some of us the right to vote," Obama wrote. "The impact was immediate, and profound - the percentage of African-Americans registered to vote skyrocketed in the years after the Voting Rights Act was passed."
However, there have been a number of efforts to remove this act. Rutenberg profiled Rosanell Eaton, a plaintiff in a North Carolina case arguing that voting restrictions of 2013 should be repealed.
Obama called the 94-year-old an "unsung American hero."
"She has not given up," he wrote. "She's still marching. She's still fighting to make real the promise of America. She still believes that We the People have the awesome power to make our union more perfect. And if we join her, we, too, can reaffirm the fundamental truth of the words Rosanell recited."
In 2008, when Obama was elected, noted Rutenberg, the "black voter turnout was nearly equal to white voter turnout for the first time."
"I am where I am today only because men and women like Rosanell Eaton refused to accept anything less than a full measure of equality," the president wrote.
Last week, he noted on the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act at the White House that some states have brought in laws to "discourage some people from voting".
He said that photo ID laws tend to make it hard for seniors and for poorer folks to vote. Such laws are not really addressing the deeper issue, in which there are examples of people going to vote in somebody else's name.
"Folks might think about shoplifting," Obama said, "but I am certain, because we've actually looked at the data on this, that almost nobody wakes up saying, I'm going to go vote in somebody else's name. Doesn't happen. So the only reason to pass this law, despite the reasonableness of how it sounds, is to make it harder for folks to vote."
