A Quote by Stanley Nelson Jr.
Usually we look at it like, "Oh, black people couldn't vote in Mississippi because they had to take a literacy test." But one of the things you learn in the film is that there were major consequences for even trying to vote. You could be killed for trying to vote. You could definitely be fired from your job and many were, which is why so few black Mississippians even attempted to register early on. They put your name in the newspaper if you tried to register to vote.
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Black men and women were not allowed to register to vote. My own mother, my own father, my grandfather and my uncles and aunts could not register to vote because each time they attempted to register to vote, they were told they could not pass the literacy test.
People must understand that people were beaten, arrested, jailed, and some people were murdered, while attempting to register to vote, or to get others to register to vote.
I am interested in garnering the white vote, and the black vote, and the Latin vote, and the Asian vote, and the business vote, and the labor vote.
Get out and vote. If you can't vote, then register other people to vote. Get people to the polls; make sure that people who need to vote can vote.
Many have fought for and even lost their lives to end segregation, to win the right to vote. It disappoints me to now have to cajole people to register and to vote.
In Selma, Alabama, in 1965, only 2.1 percent of blacks of voting age were registered to vote. The only place you could attempt to register was to go down to the courthouse. You had to pass a so-called literacy test. And they would tell people over and over again that they didn't or couldn't pass the literacy test.
I know lots of people in Mississippi who have lost their jobs trying to register to vote.
They talked about how it was our rights as human beings to register and vote. I never knew we could vote before. Nobody ever told us.
During a speech on Sunday, President Obama said to the crowd, 'We've got to vote. Vote. Vote. Vote. Vote. Vote.' This went on for an hour until someone finally fixed his teleprompter.
When only men could register to vote, we required only men to register for the draft. Today both sexes can vote, but only men must register for the draft.
The establishment wonders why we can't get more of the black vote. It's because it's not doing the things necessary to establish a deeper relationship with the black community. Most black people don't think alike. Most black people just vote alike.
If you look at literacy tests in the South, for example, they were absurdly difficult and didn't measure literacy. They were simply measuring whether or not you were black. So at every moment when we've said, hey, we don't want certain people to vote because they are not educated enough, it is often simply become a way of excluding black and brown people.
Vote? What's so fun about voting? You should never vote, everyone knows that. If you vote and your guy wins you can't later complain because you helped put him there. That's why I never vote, so I can later complain.
The black man in North America was sickest of all politically. He let the white man divide him into such foolishness as considering himself a black 'Democrat,' a black 'Republican,' a black 'Conservative,' or a black 'Liberal' ...when a ten-million black vote bloc could be the deciding balance of power in American politics, because the white man's vote is almost always evenly divided.
When we support or vote for candidates outside the two major political parties we are immediately lectured about wasting our vote or making it easier for the less desirable of the two major candidates to claim victory. These lies are repeated every election and they must be ignored. You never waste your vote if you vote your conscience.
If you want a referendum, vote for the others. Or, in certain cases, you can stay at home, you don't vote and you could find yourself with a referendum by default because you didn't exercise your vote.
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