Eight days before my 13th birthday in 1964, the bodies of civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner finally were found, 44 days after they had disappeared in Mississippi while trying to register Black people to vote.
Freed for the summer from our still-segregated school, it was all my friends and I had talked about for weeks. We had been so hopeful when President Kennedy proposed the Civil Rights Act in 1963 to give us the same rights as white people. But a filibuster killed that effort. Then he was assassinated.
We were certain the three were dead. We just wanted their bodies returned to their families, their killers brought to justice, and the nation finally to accept the righteousness of their mission. Seeing the media at work that summer, telling the story of Black Americans to the world, set me on a path into journalism; words could change the world.
“You have been slaves too long,” Schwerner had told Black churchgoers. “We can help you help yourselves.”
In the 1960s, Black Americans could legally vote, but some places in the South used literacy tests, poll taxes and other ploys to prevent them. With Congress passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, just before the activists were killed, and later the Voting Rights Act of 1965, their deaths—and subsequent media coverage— did help move this nation closer to the values embedded in its foundational documents.
The exercise of those rights and others, codified long after their deaths, helped result in the election in 2008 of Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president, and in a record voter turnout last year, in the election of Kamala Harris, the first female Vice President and a Black and Asian-American one at that. In 2014, Obama awarded Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner, posthumously, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Today, voting rights and the protections the three men died for are imperiled. Critics of the Act argue that Obama’s election proves provisions outlawing racially discriminatory election practices are no longer necessary. Supporters say his election proves the Act was effective before the U.S. Supreme Court began eviscerating it. Now, supporters of Donald Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud in 2020 are attempting to return us to a malevolent era. They argue that new voter restrictions allowing states to purge lists of registered voters, close polling places in minority neighborhoods, and restrict mail-in-voting are necessary for election integrity.
In 48 states this year, Republicans introduced 389 restrictive bills, passing 28 laws in 17 states, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a New York-based law and policy institute. I met its namesake, the late Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, in the late 1980s when I was the Miami Herald’s first Black female editorial writer and regular Op-Ed columnist.
Texas, the largest red state, is particularly aggressive. The court’s ruling in a 2009 Texas case involving the 1965 Act led the way to its 2013 decision that gutted the Act. The court ruled in 2013, in effect, that states that had discriminated against voters because of race no longer needed federal preclearance to alter their voting rules and processes. The 1965 Act covered nine states, including Texas. The day after the 2013 ruling, then State Attorney General Greg Abbott announced that Texas would implement a stringent photo identification law and proceed with redrawn legislative districts that diluted minority voting strength. He is governor now.
What’s happening in Texas? It is becoming more Hispanic, Black and younger. This is the nation’s future.
After Democratic legislators exited the State Capitol in Austin in May 2021, denying Republicans a quorum to pass an omnibus restrictive voter bill, Abbot defunded the legislature. The lawmakers fled again from a July special session, some returning a second time to Washington. There, they again begged members of Congress to pass the For The People Act, which would expand voting rights; and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would restore the heart of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Senate Republicans and some Democrats opposed to eliminating the filibuster have stalled the bills.
President Joe Biden in mid-July condemned the tide of restrictive bills in an address to the American people, so nationwide, Democratic organizations and voter rights groups continue to roll out massive registration and mobilization campaigns while rights lawyers play a high-stakes game of Whack-a-Mole.
“If you think the people don’t like what you have to say, you need to change your message and your policies so that they get on board with you. That’s the way you’re supposed to stay in power in a democracy,” Mimi Marziani, president of the Texas Civil Rights Project, and professor of law at the University of Texas, Austin, said in a telephone interview. “Instead, what we’ve seen, with increasing desperation, are attempts to try to make it more difficult to vote.”
In Texas, voting rights activists have been working for generations to register people to vote and fight attempts to restrict the right. In San Antonio, in Bexar County, “Don’t Agonize, Organize” is what Tommy Calvert Sr. says, echoing the rallying cry of the late Florynce Kennedy, an activist I helped host when she and fellow feminist Gloria Steinem spoke on my college campus in the early 1970s.
In 1977, Calvert helped found Neighborhoods First Alliance, a multi-issue non-profit coalition of 30 organizations. He is the only president it has ever had. The organization’s top priority is helping rid its communities of crime, he said in a telephone interview, but his volunteer team and partners also register people to vote all the time. “It’s central to our mission.”
He estimated the Alliance has registered between 75,000 and 100,000 people and helped many become volunteer deputy registrars, or VDRs, people who pass a test and are authorized by the elections department to register others to vote.
“We live in a high-tech world and a lot of groups do voter registration work with their computers. We do it with clipboards in your garage, on your front porch, in your backyard,” said the 69-year-old Calvert Sr., who is vice president of marketing and sales at KROV-FM, a community radio station, where his son, Tommy Calvert Jr., 40, is general manager.
The younger Calvert is also civic-minded. Calvert Jr. is the youngest and first Black Bexar County commissioner. His proud father said he helped his son’s campaigns by offering fieldwork and strategy, culled from his experience locally and nationally working on issues like the placement of toxic waste sites near schools and in minority communities, or addressing poor infrastructure that resulted in flooding so serious that people were drowning in their homes.
“Everybody likes to go do voter registration in the easy places—campuses, high schools, churches, civic events, high-profile areas,” Calvert Sr. said. “We go where other people don’t go, like high-crime places and housing projects, poor working-class neighborhoods. The most successful place where we register people to vote is bus stops.”
“We explain to people if they’re not registered to vote, it’s like walking around naked, unarmed. You’re not protecting your family. This is like having a shotgun,” he said.
Calvert Sr. grew up in San Antonio. His mother was Black and not married to his father, who was Mexican. “I’m successful because I work with a very broad-based coalition of people,” he said. “I work with the Browns, Blacks, Whites, gays, everybody. I even have a lot of Republican friends, some pragmatic Republicans.”
Since 2016, H. Drew Galloway was executive director of MOVE Texas (Mobilize. Organize. Vote. Empower.), which he transformed from a small student-run organization into a statewide institution that has registered more than 120,000 young voters, he said in a telephone interview. In May 2021, Galloway resigned to start BRIDGE (Building Resourced Infrastructure for Diverse Grassroots Engagement), an organization whose mission is to nurture Texas’s next generation of social justice organizers.
“Texas is the laboratory for voting rights and voter suppression for the entire country,” he said. Its restrictive voter ID laws have been replicated elsewhere. The omnibus bill before the Republican-controlled state legislature “will harm communities of color in Texas but will also be photocopied into other states like Ohio, Florida, North Carolina and Georgia. Organizations are continuing to fight.”
Galloway, 38 years old, who has known and worked with Calvert Sr. since 2013, said, “He’s been a mainstay in San Antonio’s East Side for decades. Neighborhoods First Alliance is an incredible group. They do the work on the ground every day.” With the radio station, the father and son have “a real strong powerful voice in the community.”
During a protest march in 2020 over the murder of George Floyd, Valerie Reiffert had an epiphany. “I saw the amount of people out there and thought, wow, someone ought to be out here getting people registered to vote,” she said in a telephone interview.
Within a week, she had become a volunteer deputy registrar and with three friends founded Radical Registrars, which now has about ten active VDRs. They have registered more than 1,000 people and helped about 150 become VDRs, she said.
Calvert Sr. is unflinching about the mission to register voters. “We tell people, people have died for you to have the right to vote. People have been tarred and feathered for you to have the right to vote. People have been lynched for you to have the right to vote. I have friends who have been brutalized for you to have the right to vote.”