Voting Rights as Civil Rights, Then and Now
Sunday was the anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, and I wrote a piece about John Lewis’s speechto mark the occasion. (Lewis was then the 23-year-old chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC], and the organizers of the march forced him to tone down his rhetoric before he hit the podium.)
Today, Lewis is a member of the House of Representatives, not a youth activist. But his concern for students and for voting rights persists. And this morning he’s got an op-ed in the New York Times talking about new threats to student access to the ballot box. Here’s an excerpt:
The most common new requirement, that citizens obtain and display unexpired government-issued photo identification before entering the voting booth, was advanced in 35 states and passed by Republican