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Washington, D.C., Residents Ride for Freedom to Vote |
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The Freedom Rides of the 1960s played a pivotal role in building support for civil and voting rights for people of color across the South. Next month, activists from across the Washington, D.C., area will join their own “D.C. Freedom Ride” to demand voting rights for the residents of the nation’s capital.
D.C. Vote, a group backing democracy for D.C. residents, is sponsoring a bus tour through three states—Virginia, Kentucky and West Virginia—Sept. 15–17. Some 100 people are expected to ride on two buses covered with the slogans “We Demand the Vote” and “Taxation Without Representation.”
The bus trip comes as hundreds of Kentucky union members are pledging their time and efforts to elect Steve Beshear (D) governor this fall. We reported that Labor 2007’s mobilization to elect Beshear, along with state Sen. Daniel Mongiardo, who is the candidate for lieutenant governor, is picking up speed as local unions around the state gear up to toss out the incumbent Republican Ernie Fletcher, a Sen. Mitch McConnell protégé.
During his tenure, Fletcher has worked with his corporate cronies to try to slash wages by attempting to gut prevailing wage laws and attacked workers’ rights through his campaign to outlaw union security clauses and turn Kentucky into a “right to work” for less state.
The major event of the trip will be a rally Sept. 16 in Louisville, Ky., where participants will deliver a petition for D.C. voting rights to the office of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R). They will deliver more petitions to his office on Capitol Hill the next day. McConnell virulently opposes the bill and has led the Senate opposition to it. McConnell said, in a March speech, “In order to get a congressman, you have to be a state.”
The House passed the legislation 241–177 in April. The Senate bill, S. 1257, was introduced by Sens. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Bob Bennett (R-Utah). The bill would create a congressional district in the District of Columbia and allow the residents to elect a voting member of Congress. Currently, the nearly 600,000 District residents only can elect a non-voting delegate to represent them in Congress.
To join the bus trip and for more information, contact Eugene Kinlow of D.C. Vote at ekinlow@dcvote.org.
The battle for D.C. voting rights has strong public support. According to a recent national poll conducted by KRC Research, 82 percent of Americans believe District residents deserve full voting representation in Congress.
The national poll, conducted in 2005, also found a majority of respondents were unaware that District residents were denied democracy. Some four out of five Americans (78 percent) thought District residents have voting rights in Congress equal to those of their fellow Americans. Ilir Zherka, executive director of D.C. Vote, says the poll
certainly gives us a sense of the awareness, or lack thereof, outside the D.C. area and reinforces what we all know in our guts, which is: Once people know about D.C.’s status, they support full voting representation for the District.
Joslyn Williams, president of the Metropolitan Washington Council, says voting rights for District residents is not just a political issue, it is an issue of fundamental human rights.
This is supposed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave. We in the District are brave, but we are not free because we do not the right to have our voice heard in the halls of Congress.
It’s not about Democrats or Republicans. It’s about doing what’s right.
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