Voting Rights Act Quotes

The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.

Schools don't teach American history that well, especially a lot of black American history.

Voter fraud does just barely exist, while racism, according to the Supreme Court, is a thing of the past.

Too many people struggled, suffered, and died to make it possible for every American to exercise their right to vote.

I've said it in the past and I'll say it again today: the vote is precious; it's almost sacred.

Since the birth of our Nation, no other right has been more important than having the ability to vote. Unfortunately, as history has shown, the denial of this right to minorities is a scar on our system of democracy.

I'm old enough to have lived through a time when Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, Viola Liuzzo, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and others died so people of color could vote.

It is essential that every eligible American voter has the ability and access to have their voice heard.

The great majority of negroes in the South who do not vote, do not care to vote and would not know for what to vote if they could.

Lyndon Johnson used to call his chauffer “Boy,” but he passed the greatest Civil Rights bill in the history of the company.

There is more to the right to vote than the right to mark a piece of paper and drop it in a box or the right to pull a lever in a voting booth .... It also includes the right to have the vote counted at full value without dilution or discount.

I do vote. I have voted ever since I've been eligible to vote.

Yes, President Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, but a hundred years later, the Republican Party wasn't Lincoln's. Richard Nixon became president by courting Americans upset by integration, intentionally fueling the racial divide.

Why can a Communist eat at a lunch counter in Selma, Alabama while a Black American veteran cannot?

Negro suffrage is political arsenic. If it is not, why do not the free States open wide their throats and gulp down the graceful and invigorating draught?

Votes for women didn’t come until the 1920’s. Votes for Blacks didn’t effectively come until the 1960’s.

If it hadn't been for that march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday, there would be no Barack Obama as President of the United States of America.

I think that America could not become America until it dealt with the disenfranchisement of women and African Americans in the last century. It had to. America could not become America until it dealt with that. And did it deal with it perfectly? No. But it had to confront it.

Republicans and blacks had an unlikely alliance around 'max black' after the 1990 census. By concentrating black voters in some districts, the strategy elected a record number of black congressmen in 1992. But the remaining 'bleached' districts were more likely to elect white Republicans.

Democrats in Louisville were led by Courier-Journal editor Henry Watterson and were implacably opposed to blacks voting.

One thing 'not right' on the 50th anniversary of the Selma marches is the sad fact that the Edmund Pettus Bridge hasn't been renamed the John Lewis Bridge.

What we say is that democracy means that you have the right to vote without intimidation and undue burdens. But if you stand in line for six hours, technically, today there is no document, no standard, no law that says that that's wrong.

There is no Constitutional issue here. The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong - deadly wrong - to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of States' rights or National rights. There is only the struggle for human rights.

During the Jim Crow era, poll taxes and literacy tests kept the African-Americans from polls. But today, felon disenfranchisement laws accomplished what poll taxes and literacy tests ultimately could not, because those laws were struck down. But felony disenfranchisement laws had been allowed to stand.

I grew up in the early '60s, and there was a lot of civil rights, a lot of unrest in our country.