Celebrating Juneteenth With Freedom Rides In Support Of Voting Rights Legislation

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Facing South reports, Black Voters Matter holds Freedom Ride across the South to promote voting rights (excerpt):

Now, with voting rights once again under attack, organizers are borrowing a page from that storied chapter in American history to raise awareness and promote policy solutions — including a voting rights bill named for Lewis.

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On June 19, the people’s holiday known as Juneteenth — as of this week also a federal holiday marking the end of American slavery — Black Voters Matter will launch its Freedom Ride for Voting Rights to protest state actions to restrict ballot access, which would have a disproportionate effect on Black voters, and to build support for federal voting rights legislation.

So far this year, state lawmakers have introduced 361 bills that would limit voting, many of them in Southern states, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

“With state legislatures actively working to undermine our rights and strip us of our most basic freedoms, the parallels to Juneteenth are uncanny,” Cliff Albright and LaTosha Brown, co-founders of Black Voters Matter, said in a statement. “Every bill to suppress votes, criminalize protests, and weaken Black power is a reminder of the enduring history of slavery in this country.”

The initiative was announced last month on the 60th anniversary of the original Freedom Rides “to show voters, communities, and elected officials of how far we’ve come and remind them what Black power can do,” as Brown and Albright said. Also involving local and national partners, the bus tour seeks to raise public awareness about voter suppression and to pressure lawmakers to support the two pieces of federal legislation: the For the People Act, which has been called the “the next great civil rights bill,” and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act.

The For the People Act, which has the approval of two-thirds of voters including a majority of Republicans, has already passed the House and awaits action in the closely divided Senate, where it’s opposed by conservative Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia. The bill named for Lewis, which would restore the Voting Rights Act of 1965 after its 2013 gutting by the U.S. Supreme Court, passed the House in the last Congress but went nowhere in the Senate under control of former Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. It still has not been formally reintroduced this session.

The Freedom Ride for Voting Rights will kick off with a Juneteenth celebration in Jackson, Mississippi, and make stops in Birmingham, Alabama; Nashville, Tennessee; Atlanta; Columbia, South Carolina; Raleigh, North Carolina; Charleston, West Virginia; and Richmond, Virginia. The tour concludes with a June 26 rally in Washington, D.C., to deliver its message straight to Washington.

“Our communities cannot wait for voting rights reform,” said Brown. “We need federal leadership and the immediate passage of H.R. 1 and H.R. 4 to protect voting rights now.”

The Freedom Riders are also coming from Arizona. The Arizona Republic reports, Arizonans to participate in ‘Freedom Rides’ to DC in support of voting-rights bill:

Growing up as a Black man in the 1960s, Aubrey Barnwell still feels the sting of Jim Crow laws and remembers the lasting impact they had on him and his parents.

“My parents drove from North Dakota to Florida when I was a baby,” Barnwell recalls. “On their way, they stopped at a store to get some milk. The people at the store would not allow them to go in the store. They handed the milk (to them) out the door.

“My mother and father poured the milk out because they were not sure what the individuals who had given them the milk had done to it.”

That was just one of many childhood experiences Barnwell cites as inspiring him to board a bus from Phoenix to Washington, D.C., this Friday to rally lawmakers in support of the For the People Act, a bill aimed at expanding voting rights across the country.

The bus will leave Phoenix the day before Juneteenth — the annual holiday commemorating the end of enslavement in the United States.

Barnwell, a 60-year-old pastor from Peoria, is on the board of Case Action, a progressive social justice group that is co-organizing the rides along with Unite Here Local 11, a labor union:

Civil Rights Fight of our Lifetime: Hundreds of UNITE HERE Local 11 Members & Community Allies Launch Freedom Ride From Phoenix, AZ to Washington D.C to Pass the For The People Act

Who: UNITE HERE Local 11, CASE Action, Black Voters Matter, and other community allies
What: Launch freedom ride to urge the Senate to pass the For the People Act
When: Launch June 18, 2021 from Phoenix, AZ 11:30am – June 26th, 2021 Washington, D.C at 10:45 AM
Where: Phoenix launch 1021 S. 7th Ave, Phoenix, AZ 85007
Follow: @UNITEHERE11AZ , and @CASEActionAZ, and @BlackVotersMtr #UNITEHERE #FreedomRide2021

He and other Freedom Riders, as they are called, will board the bus on Friday and stop at cities where prominent events of the Civil Rights era happened, including Tulsa, Okla.; Little Rock, Ark.; and Greensboro, N.C. Their journey will end June 26 in Washington, D.C., where they hope to meet with lawmakers to show support of the voting-rights bill.

The rides are named after the original 1960s Freedom Rides, in which civil rights activists rode interstate buses into the South to challenge racial segregation.

“Some people were remarking that they feel actually somewhat upset that people who really died for the right to vote in the ’60’s now are having to do something 60 years later on the same issue,” said Susan Minato, Unite Here Local 11 co-president. “It does not seem like it should be this way. And so it’s a continuation of a movement that is constantly refining the Constitution and the democracy of our country.”

Marisela Mares, a 23-year-old labor organizer and former food service worker from south Phoenix, says participating in the Freedom Ride is “especially poignant” for her as a transgender woman of color.

“We already go through enough hardships in life and so to add on top of that, making it even harder for me to vote,” Mares said. “There’s a lot of trans folks that have disabilities that don’t really have the time or energy or the capacity to go and wait in line at a polling place. We need to protect access to the early ballot.”

The bill would reform redistricting and election security laws in addition to expanding early voting and requiring states to set up automatic voter registration for eligible voters in federal elections.

Some of the bill’s features — and goals — already exist in the status quo in Arizona, such as widespread early voting, but others are new, said David Gartner, a professor of law and associate dean of the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University.

“The things that don’t yet exist in Arizona, which exist in every neighboring state, (include) things like automatic voter registration: when people, for example, get a driver’s license, it would automatically enroll those who are eligible,” said Gartner, who specializes in election law.

He added that “there’s a whole other section of the bill that addresses ethics and campaign finance.”

“This system, slightly different than Arizona’s elections, would create a matching system for donations that are $200 or less,” he said. “The idea, and there’s some evidence for this, is more people will participate both in funding elections and also in running themselves. So those pieces aren’t directly related to who gets to vote, but may influence who shapes the elections.”

But the fate of the For the People Act itself is unknown. While it passed in the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives in a near party-line vote in March, its future is uncertain in the divided Senate, where Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., called it “partisan voting legislation” and said he will vote against it in its current form.

Sen. Manchin has since offered a “list of demands” that he would support. Joe Manchin’s sweeping new voting rights proposal, explained. The ten Republican “patriotic senators” that Sen. Manchin believes exist do not. That was made clear yesterday. Joe Manchin reaches out to Republicans, and they slap him in the face.

Sen. Manchin’s hometown newspaper, the Charleston Gazzette-Mail editorializes (excerpt):

Sen. Manchin is a centrist and a dealmaker. However, his recent op-ed in the Gazette-Mail in which he declared he will vote against the For the People Act — aimed at getting dark money out of politics and eliminating heavy voter suppression tactics enacted by Republican legislatures — did not compute. As many have said, and will continue to say, arguing against a bill to stop partisan voter suppression because there’s no bipartisan support is headache-inducing.

The same could be said about Manchin’s seemingly unmovable stance on the filibuster.

It flies in the face of Manchin’s previous support of voting rights expansion — he co-sponsored a similar bill in 2019 — and his previously stated desire for filibuster reform.

Manchin this week released his own wish list of sorts for a voting bill that agreed with major points of the For the People Act, but it faces the same problem without changes to the filibuster.

Some have noted that Manchin’s arguments against things he used to support mirror talking points from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a group that resumed donating to Manchin this year after a nearly decade-long drought. It would make sense that the conservative group would try to reach Manchin now, given his sudden relevance in the Senate.

[N]ow, Manchin has preemptively shut down negotiations on the For the People Act, while coming up with his own list of demands, despite the former’s soaring popularity among Democrats and Republicans in West Virginia. That’s bipartisan, right? That’s what the constituents want. Surely, Manchin’s seen the polling. So why won’t he budge?

Earlier this week, the national Poor People’s Campaign marched on Manchin’s office in Charleston. Manchin was in D.C., but he knew about the protest.

You have to wonder if something like that will move Manchin at all. Is he now just another politician with a deaf ear? Is he simply enjoying being wooed and getting the spotlight now that he’s so crucial to the Democrats’ agenda? Does he really think he’s doing what’s best, even when so many he represents express their frustration?

We’re not sure what the answer is, but it can’t be that these are things West Virginians don’t want, and it can’t be bipartisanship for bipartisanship’s sake.

Manchin knows this isn’t playing well back home. How much he shows he cares about that will be telling.

The Republic continues:

“It’s probably fair to say that the things that (Manchin) doesn’t like are unlikely to make it into any final legislation, but the harder question is, ‘Is any of it going to make it into law,’” Gartner said.

That will depend on the filibuster, a Senate rule that requires a 60-vote majority for legislation to move forward.

Both Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., are opposed to eliminating the filibuster, which have made them the targets of criticism from many Democrats. However, Sinema has co-sponsored the For the People Act, calling it “critical voting-rights legislation.”

“Given the filibuster, it will turn on those same two people, the senator from West Virginia and the senator from Arizona,” Gartner said of the bill’s viability in the Senate. “And I don’t know that anybody knows that answer.”

Minato says that Unite Here Local 11 helped elect Sinema to the Senate in 2018, and hopes she will hear their concerns. “We want her to know that the people of Arizona, the people in the country, really care about this issue so that’s why we’re starting in Arizona.”

Sinema’s office said that she “welcomes the support of UNITE HERE 11 and other Arizonans” for the For the People Act and “believes the right to vote, faith in the integrity of our electoral process, and trust in elected officials are critical to the health and vitality of our democracy.”

“She is a cosponsor and supporter of both the For The People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act because she supports legislation restoring critical safeguards that protect every American’s right to vote, and she supports reforms that reduce the influence of money in politics, secure our elections from foreign interference, and hold government officials to the highest ethical standards,” Sinema spokesperson Hannah Hurley wrote in a statement.

Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., also supports the bill.

Mares, one of the Freedom Riders, said the rides represent an ongoing fight against the filibuster in order to secure the passage of the bill in the Senate.

“Fifty or sixty years ago we risked our lives to end segregation and to win civil rights and voting rights, and we’re still fighting,” said Mares, the labor organizer who will participate in the rides. “The filibuster is still there, there are still people that don’t see this as an urgent issue and I think that’s even more reason why we have to go in and put that pressure and inspire the leaders to really take action.”

Freedom Rides – Alabama (excerpt):

Forewarned by Birmingham civil rights leader Fred Shuttlesworth of possible attacks in Alabama, the groups pressed onward. On May 14, the Greyhound bus arrived at the terminal in Anniston, Calhoun County, where a white mob waited with clubs and bats. The crowd attacked the bus, breaking its windows and slashing tires, and then pursuing it until the driver was forced to stop because of flat tires several miles out of town. An attacker threw an incendiary bomb through a window, and the Freedom Riders and other passengers barely escaped the flames. E. L. Cowling, an Alabama undercover police officer, was aboard the bus and forced the attackers back at gunpoint. As the bus burned, the white mob beat the Freedom Riders until the police arrived and ended the violence.

UPDATE: Moral March on Manchin & McConnell:

Join us on June 23rd as we stand against voter suppression, the filibuster, and political retrogression.

ALL ROADS LEAD TO WASHINGTON, DC! GET ON THE BUS! CLICK HERE to reserve your bus seat.





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