A Quote by Unita Blackwell
People were threatened, folks was put in jail just because we wanted people to try to register to vote.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
I got involved because I wanted to help inspire more people to get off their butts and register and vote - not just in this election, but in every other election from now on, you know?
People should organize people to just turn up and participate in the democratic process. Knock on doors. They may not be old enough to register to vote, but they can urge their teachers, their parents, their grandparents, their mothers, their fathers, and others to get out and vote.
Let's remind ourselves that offering an opportunity for somebody to register to vote at the Department of Motor Vehicles has been required by federal law for decades now. We know it as motor voter. So whether it's motor voter and people registering on paper or online voter registration, we have the protocols in place to keep people who are not eligible to register to vote from registering, whether it's for citizenship status, whether it's for age or any other reason.
When you compare what people endured in the South in the 60s to try to get the right to vote for African Americans, and to compare what people were subjected to there to what happened in Philadelphia - which was inappropriate, certainly that . . . to describe it in those terms I think does a great disservice to people who put their lives on the line, who risked all, for my people.
I really want to get the word out to people to register because of course, the more people vote, the more our democracy works.
The first time when I was organizing, I went out and started knocking on doors to see if people were registered to vote. I was a door knocker. I didn't even have the confidence that I could register people, so I just was out there door knocking. That was my first experience.
You do have this circumstance in Karachi that because people know things are changing, the stakes are higher. Everyone is thinking, "My home is threatened, my job is threatened, my identity is threatened, my world is threatened." And that creates a very particular sort of climate, that is linked.
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 1965, the attempted march from Selma to Montgomery on March 7 was planned to dramatize to the state of Alabama and to the nation that people of color wanted to register to vote.
Young Latinos have been telling me that they want to register to vote because of Donald Trump. Not because they want to vote for him but because they want to vote against him.
Lukewarm people feel secure because they attend church, made a profession of faith at age twelve, were baptized, come from a Christian family, vote Republican, or live in America. Just as the prophets in the Old Testament warned Israel that they were not safe just because they lived in the land of Israel, so we are not safe just because we wear the label 'Christian' or because some people persist in calling us a 'Christian nation.
The key is to vote because we need a vote to put the people in power that we want to represent us.
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