Voting Rights and the Battle for Equality

How the words of Frederick Douglass continue to resonate today

On August 6, the 56th anniversary of the signing of the Voting Rights Act, protestors in Washington, DC, spoke out on the need to pass new voting rights legislation. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

A little over half a century ago, on Aug 6, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act. Passing 79-18 in the Senate and 328-74 in the House, it sought to overcome the continuing efforts to deny Black Americans the right to vote by such means as requiring literacy tests, lying about the date or time of the voting, instituting poll taxes, claiming they wrongly completed an application or even demanding they recite the entire US Constitution.

As we know, the battle to ensure democracy’s most sacred right continues: At least 18 states have passed 30 laws this year to restrict access to the vote. As the Brennan Center for Justice notes, these laws include making early and mail-in voting harder, imposing harsher ID rules and making fraudulent voter purges more probable.

At a time when the prospect of Congress passing new federal voting rights legislation to counteract these efforts remains in doubt, it’s worth looking at the eloquent speech of the great Frederick Douglass from 1867. In this speech he laid out the continuing dangers the country would suffer if it refused to grant millions of Americans this most basic right. He depicted the risk of divisions that would never heal if millions remained disenfranchised for the sake of the white population’s need to maintain dominion over them.

While his view emerged from the fresh horror of slavery—and the effort by slave-owners to deny the previously enslaved rights as full citizens—the issues resonate with our own time. “Disfranchisement in a republican government based upon the idea of human equality and universal suffrage, is a very different thing from disfranchisement in governments based upon the idea of the divine right of kings, or the entire subjugation of the masses,” Douglass asserted.

And this: “Congress must supplant the evident sectional tendencies of the South by national dispositions and tendencies. It must cause national ideas and objects to take the lead and control the politics of those States. It must cease to recognize the old slave-masters as the only competent persons to rule the South.”

Douglass ends with a comment about the right to vote that is more plea than question: “…will the country be peaceful, united and happy, or troubled, divided and miserable?”

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What follows are highlights from Frederick Douglass’ “Appeal to Congress for Impartial Suffrage.” I think it’s worth your time:

“It is no less a crime against the manhood of a man, to declare that he shall not share in the making and directing of the government under which he lives…The fundamental and unanswerable argument in favor of the enfranchisement of the negro is found in the undisputed fact of his manhood. He is a man, and by every fact and argument by which any man can sustain his right to vote, the negro can sustain his right equally. It is plain that, if the right belongs to any, it belongs to all. The doctrine that some men have no rights that others are bound to respect, is a doctrine which we must banish as we have banished slavery, from which it emanated.”

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“It is true that a strong plea for equal suffrage might be addressed to the national sense of honor. Something, too, might be said of national gratitude. A nation might well hesitate before the temptation to betray its allies. There is something immeasurably mean, to say nothing of the cruelty, in placing the loyal negroes of the South under the political power of their Rebel masters. To make peace with our enemies is all well enough; but to prefer our enemies and sacrifice our friends—to exalt our enemies and cast down our friends—to clothe our enemies, who sought the destruction of the government, with all political power, and leave our friends powerless in their hands is an act which need not be characterized here.

“We asked the negroes to espouse our cause, to be our friends, to fight for us, and against their masters; and now, after they have done all that we asked them to do—helped us to conquer their masters, and thereby directed toward themselves the furious hate of the vanquished—it is proposed in some quarters to turn them over to the political control of the common enemy of the government and of the negro.

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“It must be observed, that disfranchisement in a republican government based upon the idea of human equality and universal suffrage, is a very different thing from disfranchisement in governments based upon the idea of the divine right of kings, or the entire subjugation of the masses. Masses of men can take care of themselves. Besides, the disabilities imposed upon all are necessarily without that bitter and stinging element of invidiousness which attaches to disfranchisement in a republic. What is common to all works no special sense of degradation to any. But in a country like ours, where men of all nations, kindred, and tongues are freely enfranchised, and allowed to vote, to say to the negro, You shall not vote, is to deal his manhood a staggering blow, and to burn into his soul a bitter and goading sense of wrong, or else work in him a stupid indifference to all the elements of a manly character.

“As a nation, we cannot afford to have amongst us either this indifference and stupidity, or that burning sense of wrong. These sable millions are too powerful to be allowed to remain either indifferent or discontented. Enfranchise them, and they become self-respecting and country-loving citizens. Disfranchise them, and the mark of Cain is set upon them less mercifully than upon the first murderer, for no man was to hurt him. But this mark of inferiority—all the more palpable because of a difference of color—not only dooms the negro to be a vagabond, but makes him the prey of insult and outrage everywhere.

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“There is that, all over the South, which frightens Yankee industry, capital, and skill from its borders. We have crushed the Rebellion, but not its hopes or its malign purposes. The South fought for perfect and permanent control over the Southern laborer. It was a war of the rich against the poor. They who waged it had no objection to the government, while they could use it as a means of confirming their power over the laborer. They fought the government, not because they hated the government as such, but because they found it, as they thought, in the way between them and their one grand purpose of rendering permanent and indestructible their authority and power over the Southern laborer.

“Though the battle is for the present lost, the hope of gaining this object still exists, and pervades the whole South with a feverish excitement. We have thus far only gained a Union without unity, marriage without love, victory without peace. The hope of gaining by politics what they lost by the sword, is the secret of all this Southern unrest; and that hope must be extinguished before national ideas and objects can take full possession of the Southern mind. There is but one safe and constitutional way to banish that mischievous hope from the South, and that is by lifting the laborer beyond the unfriendly political designs of his former master.

“Give the negro the elective franchise, and you at once destroy the purely sectional policy, and wheel the Southern States into line with national interests and national objects. The last and shrewdest turn of Southern politics is a recognition of the necessity of getting into Congress immediately, and at any price. The South will comply with any conditions but suffrage for the negro. It will swallow all the unconstitutional test oaths, repeal all the ordinances of Secession, repudiate the Rebel debt, promise to pay the debt incurred in conquering its people, pass all the constitutional amendments, if only it can have the negro left under its political control.”

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“The young men of the South burn with the desire to regain what they call the lost cause; the women are noisily malignant towards the Federal government. In fact, all the elements of treason and rebellion are there under the thinnest disguise which necessity can impose.

“What, then, is the work before Congress? It is to save the people of the South from themselves, and the nation from detriment on their account. Congress must supplant the evident sectional tendencies of the South by national dispositions and tendencies. It must cause national ideas and objects to take the lead and control the politics of those States. It must cease to recognize the old slave-masters as the only competent persons to rule the South. In a word, it must enfranchise the negro, and by means of the loyal negroes and the loyal white men of the South build up a national party there, and in time bridge the chasm between North and South, so that our country may have a common liberty and a common civilization. The new wine must be put into new bottles. The lamb may not be trusted with the wolf. Loyalty is hardly safe with traitors.”

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“This evil principle again seeks admission into our body politic. It comes now in shape of a denial of political rights to four million loyal colored people. The South does not now ask for slavery. It only asks for a large degraded caste, which shall have no political rights. This ends the case. Statesmen, beware what you do. The destiny of unborn and unnumbered generations is in your hands. Will you repeat the mistake of your fathers, who sinned ignorantly? or will you profit by the blood-bought wisdom all round you, and forever expel every vestige of the old abomination from our national borders? As you members of the Thirty-ninth Congress decide, will the country be peaceful, united, and happy, or troubled, divided, and miserable?”

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The 15th Amendment to the US Constitution passed in 1870. It states: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

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