My late grandmother, Juanita Johnson, who helped raise me as a kid, while my parents worked, was born in the year, 1930, in Slaton, Texas – a small, segregated town in Lubbock County to a family of sharecroppers.
As she grew up, the racist Jim Crow laws enforced state sanctioned disenfranchisement, and voter suppression by requiring Black people to pay poll taxes, and pass literacy tests in order to excercise the right to vote. At the time, it was a daunting task for a Black person in the South to have the opportunity to have their voice heard through the ballot, especially, if you were a woman. Although, the White Women’s suffrage movement officially ended in 1920, the African American women continued working for years to exercise their right to vote.
Thurgood Marshall, then a civil rights attorney at the NAACP, took a nearby Houston lawsuit all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. When he won the case, Smith v. Allwright, the Texas White primary was declared unconstitutional. African American women did critical work to support that effort. Even after Smith v. Allwright, many Black women in Texas still couldn’t vote until the 1960s. Texas was one of the last five states that still required a poll tax in order to vote, when the 24th Amendment banned the practice in 1964. Then in 1965, Congress passed the landmark Voting Rights Act, outlawing literacy tests and creating federal oversight of elections across the country.
As we are now two weeks from Election Day, let us remember not only who we are voting for but why we are voting.
“Voting is the first step in our journey of political activism, it is the very least we can do.”
WA State Representative Jesse E. Johnson
Yes, we must continue our efforts beyond Election Day. So that we can pass progressive legislation that benefits our communities, and then work to make sure that legislation is enforced on the ground. But we must first remember our own power and our own voice in our vote.
#YourVoteIsYourVoice
#RepresentationMatters