Voting is a civil rights issue
"We are really, in a sense, maybe not totally practicing democracy," King said. "We are practicing oppression."
(Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speaks at an August 26, 1964, press conference in Washington, D.C. Original black and white negative by Marion S. Trikosko. Colorized by Jordan J. Lloyd. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division/Unsplash)
With voting rights under attack across the United States, experts and advocates are sounding the alarm on the rise of voter suppression efforts at each level of government.
Recognizing voting as a civil rights issue was the focus of a March panel at South by Southwest (SXSW), including husband-and-wife Martin Luther King III and Arndrea Waters King of the Drum Major Institute.
The "drum major instinct" sermon marked the final sermon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. It went on to be played at his funeral by his wife, Coretta Scott King.
"He, in a very real sense, eulogized himself," Waters King said. "And we believe at Drum Major that his call is our pursuit."
Also appearing was Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, who spoke about her work preserving the right to vote for every American as the state’s chief election officer.
Rounding out the panel was Ralph Neas, the former executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. He was also president of People for the American Way.
U.S. promotes democracy globally while practicing oppression at home: King
Waters King noted her 14-year-old daughter, the only grandchild of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King, has fewer rights in 2023 than when she was born.
With the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington and the famous "I Have A Dream" speech coming up in August, Waters King is afraid to think about what her father-in-law would say about the world his grandchildren are growing up in.
"This is the first generation since Reconstruction that has fewer rights, particularly girls, than their parents, their grandparents, their great-grandparents, and their great-great-grandparents," Waters King said. "And we know that that’s a slippery slope."
Part of the King family’s work at the Drum Institute is finding modern-day MLKs who are active in making meaningful change in their communities.
"When laws are being used to oppress people, what we believe is that the law should lift us all up," she added.
Noting that 19 states have passed 34 bills to restrict voters’ rights in the last three years alone, King called it "perplexing" that the U.S. promotes itself as a democratic republic all over the world when at home, "we are suppressing democracy."
"We are all being assaulted by the fact that some of our elected officials are trying to make it harder to vote, as opposed to expanding the franchise," King said.
King invoked the names of John Lewis and Hosea Williams, who were brutalized while walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 on what is now known as Bloody Sunday.
King expressed his disappointment that formerly incarcerated people who have paid their debt to society remain ineligible to vote in many states, calling it "taxation without registration."
"We are really, in a sense, maybe not totally practicing democracy," King said. "We are practicing oppression."
The Voting Rights Act was gutted by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013. Since then, politicians have done more to make it harder to vote — through gerrymandering, mandatory photo identification, limiting the number of polls, and purging voter rolls — than they have to make voting more accessible and equitable.
"My dad and mom showed us throughout the modern civil rights movement that it only takes a few good women and men to be engaged," King said. "And we need to stay engaged, or we might lose our democracy."
Voter suppression bills outweigh voting rights reforms
Neas, who has said America is facing "the greatest internal threat to our democracy since the Civil War," noted hundreds of thousands of voters have been disenfranchised since the 2013 Supreme Court ruling.
In 2023 alone, more than 150 voter suppression bills have been introduced in 32 states. For Neas, his biggest concern isn’t just making sure that every American can cast a vote — it’s ensuring their votes are counted.
"We've got to make our top priority saving democracy from this moment on and for quite a while, I'm afraid," Neas said. "It's so important."
Benson’s home state of Michigan has held two successful voting rights referendums in 2018 and 2022.
One 2018 proposal transferred the power to draw the state’s congressional maps and districts from the state legislature to an independent redistricting commission, in an effort to prevent gerrymandering.
A second proposal that year added a series of voting policies to Michigan’s Constitution, including automatic voter registration, same-day voter registration, and no-excuse absentee voting.
These reforms were furthered four years later with the addition of dropboxes, nine days of early voting, and absentee voting for every election.
For Benson, preserving voting rights is more crucial now than ever.
"I think that's exactly the reason why democracy thrives — when people stand up and demand that it does," Benson said. "You can’t expect those who have gained power through one mechanism to necessarily support policies to change how that power is granted."