To the Editor:

Would you be able to vote if you had to pass a literacy test?  Can you count the number of bubbles in a bar of soap? Can you count the number of jelly beans in a jar? These were some of the tests that were required for Black citizens prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Can you imagine the pain and trauma many people endured when trying to exercise their rights as American citizens and were denied?

The late congressional Rep. John Lewis actually shed his blood in his efforts to draw attention to the fact that people of color were not allowed to vote. He was beaten, insulted and his life threatened along with many others involved in fighting for civil rights and voting rights in the 1960s. 

Do you take your right to vote for granted? Do you exercise that vote every time there is an election? In addition to John Lewis and others fighting for voting rights of minorities, think of the thousands of Americans who have served and died in military service defending democracy and our right to vote. 

I recently interviewed Payson Kennedy, who co-founded the Nantahala Outdoor Center in 1972. He was a faculty member of the University of Illinois in the 1960s. In early 1965, Kennedy took some students in a Volkswagen van to Selma, Alabama. They stayed in a housing project and every morning John Lewis, Julian Bond, Stokely Carmichael and Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to them. At noon they marched to the courthouse in Selma to register Blacks to vote but they were refused. Kennedy said the speeches and marches all emphasized non-violence. They were asked to remain non-violent despite taunts and threats. Protestors today should follow their example. 

The marches that Payson Kennedy and his students participated in, plus the famous “Bloody Sunday” march from Selma to Montgomery on March 7, 1965, led to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. This act prohibited racial discrimination in voting and was signed into law on August 6, 1965, by President Lyndon Johnson. 

Kennedy is puzzled why people don’t vote when so many people put their lives on the line for this right. He believes our country is in a crisis today probably as bad as any other time in recent history. 

In a letter written days before his death to be read on the day of his funeral, John Lewis repeated something he often said: “If you see something that is not right, you must say something and you must do something.”    

Filmmaker Michael Moore stated: “Democracy is not a spectator sport, it’s a participatory event. If we don’t participate in it, it ceases to be a democracy.” When you exercise your right to vote, you’ll be doing your part to maintain our democracy.  Use your right to vote or lose it. 

Mary A. Herr

Cherokee