OUR VOICES: Why Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Said We Must Vote

By Dr. John E. Warren

On May 17, 1957, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was among a number of Civil Rights leaders who gathered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to speak to a crowd of 20,000 people who gathered for the implementation of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court some three years earlier. In his speech, which was given some eight years before the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Dr. King laid out the importance of “us Black people having the right to vote.” He said:

“Give us the ballot, (the right to vote) and we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights;

Give us the ballot (yes), and we will no longer plead to the federal government for passage of an anti-lynching law, we will by the power of our vote write the law on the status books of the South and bring an end to the dastardly acts of the hooded perpetrators of violence.

Give us the ballot, and we will transform the salient misdeeds of bloodthirsty mobs into calculated good deeds of orderly citizens;

Give us the ballot, and we will fill our legislative halls with men of goodwill and send to the sacred halls of Congress, men who will not sign a “Southern Manifesto” because of their devotion to the manifesto of justice.

Give us the ballot and we will place judges on the benches of the South (and the North) who will do justly and love mercy, and we will place at the head of the southern states governors, who have felt not only the tang of the human, but the glow of the divine. And,

Give us the ballot, and we will quietly and nonviolently, without rancor or bitterness, implement the Supreme Court Decision of May, 1954.”

Today, we clearly have the ballot in our hands in the form of the votes we can cast on November 5, 2024 in the General Election. Everything Dr. King prophetically said we could do if we have the ballot, we now have both the ballot and the power to do. Our enemy is not those who would oppose or attempt to block our right to vote. We are our own enemy if we al- low apathy and indifference to convince us that our vote does not count.

The only question before us is, Will we use our vote to protect and improve our lives or will we surrender our rights to those who would set us back to the real days of Jim Crow and slavery? It’s in our hands on November 5th with all the people and propositions on our ballots. What will you do?

Dr. John E. Warren is publisher of The San Diego Voice and Viewpoint.