Every Vote is a Prayer

A vote is a kind of prayer about the world we desire for ourselves and our children. —Senator Raphael Warnock

Your voices are being heard and you're proving to our ancestors that their struggles were not in vain. Now we have one more thing we need to do to walk in our true power, and that is to vote. —Beyoncé

For 250 years Americans have marched and fought, been beaten and jailed, and even died, to win and protect your right to vote. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable rights,” but the right to vote was limited to white male property-owners.

Although that right was extended to men regardless “of their race, color, or previous condition of servitude” by law in 1870, it wasn't until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that barriers to African Americans voting were struck down. The fight for women's suffrage wasn't won until 1920. Native Americans finally gained citizenship and the right to vote in 1924. And young men of eighteen who could be called on to fight and die for America could not vote until 1971.

This inspiring history of the voting rights movement in America chronicles those battles from Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, and Alice Paul through Martin Luther King, Jr., Lyndon B. Johnson, John Lewis, James Clyburn, and Michelle and Barack Obama and urges us to remember, as Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves—and the only way they could do that is by not voting at all.”