Standing Up for Voting

Editor’s Note: After a distinguished career in journalism spanning six decades, Dan Rather reflected on patriotism and what it means to be an American in his recent bestselling book, What Unites Us: Reflections on Patriotism, coauthored with Elliot Kirschner. This essay was adapted from portions of the book.
 
It would be nice to say that I came out of the womb with a deep sense of fairness, that I lectured my friends in the segregated schools of my youth about the injustice of institutional racism, that my family dinner table was a hotbed of passionate discussion about the evils of Jim Crow. I would like to be able to say all of that, but it would not be true. The truth is, for most of my early life I had too little consciousness about race, and I didn’t have any deep personal empathy. It was just the way things were. It’s not an excuse by any means. It was just a fact. The banality of racism and segregation was one of its most disturbing qualities. 

There is one moment from my youth, however, that is seared in my mind (although I confess that my memory is likely not precise; it was a long time ago). The year was 1946, I was in my early teens, and my father decided it was time I attend a precinct meeting to learn about civic life. The way politics in most states worked back then was that candidates were selected at state and national party conventions, not primaries. A precinct meeting chose delegates for a county convention, which selected delegates for the state or national party gatherings. And in Texas in the 1940s, being a Democratic candidate was tantamount to election, just as it had been since the Civil War. 

It turned out that attendance at these meetings was normally an all-white and all-male affair of about maybe thirty-five to fifty people. But tonight there were four or five African American men also in attendance. By law, they had every right to be there. It was their precinct too, as my neighborhood, the Heights, abutted a predominantly African American neighborhood. But law and custom can be very different things.

I remember grumblings, stares, and tension. The African American men made it clear that they were both citizens and veterans of the recent war. I seem to recall that they brought their service records with them. For a young man like me, it was exciting and yet unnerving. Naively, I asked my father what was happening.  He said that he would explain it all later, but he did nod toward the African American men and say, “When they get up, we get up.” You voted in these meetings by standing. The precinct chair would say, “All those who support the measure, rise.” 

So, when a vote on a particular issue came up, and the African Americans rose, we rose as well. We stood up, the only white people to do so, and we were certainly noticed. I sensed the displeasure from others in the room. And I felt, as we walked out into the evening, some jostling in our path. Or maybe that was imagined.

I share this story not to suggest that my father was a hero. For his time and place, he was remarkably unprejudiced. But he was not a trailblazer. His rationale in this case was straightforward: These men had fought in the war and they were entitled to vote. It wasn’t a commitment to tear down all of Jim Crow. It was just a matter of fairness. I would like to say that this moment struck a deep moral chord within me that altered my trajectory on race from that moment forward. But it didn’t fully register. I noted it and apparently filed it away for a time when I was more prepared to understand its lessons.

When I joined CBS News in 1962, I got myself assigned to the civil rights beat. It was emerging as an important national story, and again I would like to say I wanted to cover it because I sensed the moral import of the moment. But it was more that I saw it as a great opportunity for a reporter eager to be a witness to history, and to make a name for himself. One of my first stops was meeting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Albany, Georgia. It was an early effort for his movement, and this one would ultimately end in failure. But being in the room with King, hearing him praise Mahatma Gandhi and nonviolent protest, sensing his deep spirituality based on both his Christian faith and his readings of philosophy – all of this started to focus me.

In my mind, King wasn't calling for a revolution, even though that is how many at the time perceived it. He wasn't even arguing that there was something inherently rotten with the protections and provisions under which the United States was founded. Rather, he believed, and justly so, that the translation of those ideals into practice had been lacking. If our constitutional protections had been dispensed more equally and fairly, he asserted, then the dreams of which he spoke would be a lot closer to reality. 

King was not restrained in his criticism of the status quo, but he spoke freely and with the moral backing of our founding documents. In my years covering the civil rights movement, I was always struck by the fierce determination of these men and women to fight for their place in the future of a country that had mistreated them. They were infused with an unbreak able optimism that they would prevail.

I then reported on a Ku Klux Klan rally, and then another one in rather short succession. Suddenly the stakes of the movement were very apparent. Seeing hate course through a crowd of hooded men and even some women as they rallied around a burning cross sent the chill of death down my spine. I remember trying to imagine what an African American would think, but in truth I couldn’t really imagine. It is a level of hatred that is not easy to quench and that I fear still lives within too many. Today bigotry is often clothed in euphemism, and when I hear that kind of dog­whistle rhetoric, I remember those Klan rallies.

Armed with an appreciation of King’s movement and the hatred that stood in his way, I headed to Jackson, Mississippi. As a reporter, I walked the streets, stepped into the cafes, and visited the churches to find out whom I should talk to, who mattered. I heard the obvious answers: The mayor. The local business leaders. And since it was the state capital, I sought out the legislators and others in government. But among the African Americans I met, particularly the pastors, one name kept coming up from the start: I needed to meet Mr. Evers. Medgar Evers.

By this point, Evers was in his late thirties and was already a veteran of the civil rights struggle, even if most of the country had not been paying close attention. Whereas King sought a broad mandate of social change on a variety of issues – including, of course, the right to vote – Evers was different. He was focused like a laser beam on voting.

I remember meeting Evers for the first time, and if you were a fair judge of character, you couldn’t help but be impressed. He would look you squarely in the eye when he spoke. But more than that, he was determined to bring your attention to the issue that occupied his entire being-the right to vote. Once again, I was slow to completely appreciate the importance of his particular cause, until I joined him one Election Day at a polling place on the outskirts of Jackson where African Americans were not allowed to vote. Evers and a group of black voters showed up with their papers. As they approached the white voting official at the door, some in the group seemed to tremble, understandably. Not Evers. I learned later that he had done this many times before.

What proceeded was a simple morality play, but one that shaped me as much or more than almost any other event in my lifetime. The voting official said, “What you doing here, boy?” And Evers politely responded that he had come with these fine people to vote. “You aren’t voting today, you aren’t voting any day,” came the reply. The words on the page cannot do any justice to the terror and violence in the voice. Evers explained that they had all their papers and were registered, knowing full well the response.

Suddenly, everything snapped to attention in my mind. I remembered going to the polling places with my father as early as I could walk, and the great pride with which he filled out his ballot – my father, whom at this point in 1962 I had just buried weeks earlier after his death in an automobile accident. I remembered the faces of the African American men at the precinct meeting, and standing when they stood. I retroactively understood the deep sin of segregation and racism that had enveloped me my entire life.

To write this now is to be shocked anew by my naivete and blindness. I wish I had seen all of this earlier. But the brazenness of a white election official tossing aside the constitutional right of enfranchisement, a right that entered the Constitution only after the Civil War, our bloodiest conflict made me seethe with anger. I was standing off to the side, watching this transpire. I don’t remember having a camera crew at the time. Those days, we often traveled without one, as showing up with a camera was considered a provocative’ act by local officials. But I do remember sharing my experience later with my soundman, who was from Alabama.

“What did you expect to happen?” he asked. “Not that,” I said.

“Well, that’s how it is in a lot of places,” he said.

There was a disconnect back then between what was happening in the South and what the rest of the nation knew. Many people had no idea these kinds of things were taking place. Even some of my bosses back at CBS News headquarters in New York wondered how widespread and entrenched these types of actions were. Did this happen all the time, or was it a rare occurrence? Was it being staged? 

I knew what I was seeing and I was determined to bring this story into living rooms across the nation. This was not America as I had envisioned it. And I wanted my countrymen and women to know this too. I felt a great certainty in the separation of right from wrong. My relationship with my country would never be the same. Patriotism would require standing up to what I had seen, not standing alongside it in silence.

Today, we are a divided country. Too many decent and law-abiding men and especially women are being told that this nation is not for them, that their values make us weaker, that their voice is better left unspoken. We see elected officials pounding their chests, saying their vision of America represents the only real patriotism. To them, I say that patriotism is not a cudgel. It is not an arms race. It also means confronting honestly what is wrong or sinful with our nation and government. I see my love of country imbued with a responsibility to bear witness to its faults. 

Our nation was built on a foundation of ideals. To be sure, we are a country of natural wonder--a cross-continental expanse of fertile farmland, churning rivers, great resources, and some of the most beautiful places on Earth. But more than land, we are bound together by a grand experiment in government, the rule of law, and common bonds of citizenship. This is what it means to be an American. 

I witnessed in Medgar Evers that day the very definition of courage and love of country – his country, my country, our country. After that moment, Evers and I spent more time together. We got to be a bit more than acquaintances, and we often shared a cola and a conversation in the shank of the evening after I had finished filing for the late radio news. Remarkably, I found very little hatred in the man. He didn’t hate white people, although I felt he had every right to. He hated the system and the elected officials who manipulated it. But he saw most of his white neighbors as decent Christian people who were just horribly misguided on race. They had grown up in a system they never questioned and never really understood.

However, I had a sense from that first reporting trip that Evers was living on borrowed time. To stand up for the right to vote was to challenge all the power of the Southern status quo. I was in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in June of 1963 when we got the call, and it came from King’s headquarters. Evers had been shot and killed. 

Myrlie Evers would tell me later how terrified she was. She wasn’t only in shock and mourning the sudden death of her husband; she was frightened about what might happen to her children. I wish all those who so glibly try to suppress the vote today could be forced to look into her eyes as I did that day in Jackson.

So many of our problems today are directly linked to the way we vote or how some of us are subtly prohibited from voting. In some ways, we have worked hard to enhance the ease of casting a ballot; we have early voting and voting by mail in many states. On the other hand, there are states seeking to limit access to the ballot box, even if they make claims to the contrary. And often these voter suppression efforts target the most marginal members of society. We see long lines at some precincts and short lines at others. It is easier for a white-collar worker to alter his or her schedule to vote, but for a single mother punching a clock with a long bus ride to her job, limiting voting options can amount to disenfranchisement.

It is one of the great truisms of a democratic form of government that not only political power but the very definition of citizenship is predicated on the right to vote. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 did much to fulfill the widespread enfranchisement for African Americans promised in 1870 in the Fifteenth Amendment. But a Supreme Court ruling in 2013 removed key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, and many of the gains we’ve seen are being curtailed under specious claims of voter fraud. So we see states passing voter ID laws and other hurdles, even though the truth is that in-person voter fraud is so rare as to be statistically nonexistent. The real danger to the sanctity of the vote lies in suppression.

It is inevitable that the battle lines of the recent voting wars have centered on race. Indeed, these narratives – race and voting – are inextricably intertwined. Full citizenship has been an elusive goal for many African Americans, long after the bondage of slavery was lifted. (And for African American women, as for all women, it would require an additional amendment to the Constitution to get the right to vote.) 

Those who seek to suppress voting today are either ignorant of the history or are, as I suspect is more often the case, malevolently choosing to ignore it. I am loath to judge the hearts of others on this matter, because I too was naive. Perhaps part of the problem is that schools don’t teach enough of what happened then and is still happening now.

To suppress the vote is to make a mockery of democracy. And those who do so are essentially acknowledging that their policies are unpopular. If you can’t convince a majority of voters that your ideas are worthy, you try to limit the pool of voters. This reveals a certain irony: Many who are most vocal in championing a free, open, and dynamic economy are the same political factions that suppress these principles when it comes to the currency of ideas. I think the record is clear that our republic has benefited from the expansion of suffrage.

We see disenfranchisement occurring not only with how people are allowed to vote, but also for whom. Gerrymandering isn’t just a recent phenomenon, though; the word was coined in 1812 when Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry went to such egregious lengths to redraw the state senate districts in his party’s favor that one district took on the shape of a salamander. 

More recently, gerrymandering has been taken to a new extreme, and neither of the major political parties is entirely blameless. Aided by powerful computer data analysis, it is now possible to draw district lines in such a way as to swing considerably the balance of state legislative and congressional delegations. Gerrymandering is now often used to stifle minority representation by congregating voters in districts to lessen their overall political power, and some of the fiercest court battles on voting are taking place in this arena.

Even beyond the legal hurdles to voting, a shrinking and polarized electorate damages our democracy. We need elected officials who represent wide swaths of the population, not narrow gerrymandered silos.  Our republic relies on a marketplace of ideas, but creating safe seats for both Republicans and Democrats removes the very competition for votes that is at the heart of our democracy. It lessens enthusiasm and civic engagement, which leads to apathy. One can actively suppress votes or make voting seem meaning­ less. They are two paths to the same destination. Our voting participation is far below the levels of a healthy democracy, and this should worry all of us who care about the United States. We need to be creative in finding new ways to get more people to vote. Instead we seem to be going backward.

In that neighborhood precinct meeting many decades ago, I saw democracy as an activity and a civic duty. I saw the same thing in the determination of Medgar Evers and his followers. Of course, casting a ballot is just one of our civic duties, but it's a vital one. It is an act of speech, a demand that your voice be heard, that you are included in the republic. Lessening this bond of citizenship, either forcibly or through indifference, makes us less free and less resilient as a nation.

I hope we can continue and regain our footing on a path of greater enfranchisement. The coherence of our national destiny depends on it.