On Martin Luther King’s birthday, it is incredibly important to remember his role as one of history’s most important proponents of voting rights and democracy. From his first and less celebrated speech at the Lincoln Memorial :

Give us the ballot, and we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights.

Give us the ballot, 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 statute 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 the 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 who will do justly and love mercy, and we will place at the head of the southern states governors who will, who have felt not only the tang of the human, but the glow of the Divine.

Give us the ballot, and we will quietly and nonviolently, without rancor or bitterness, implement the Supreme Court’s (Brown) decision of May seventeenth, 1954.

The following excerpt is from an excellent editorial written today by the Buffalo News editorial staff, a newspaper based in Buffalo, New York. Take a look:

If, were he alive, he might be at a loss as to why some key initiatives for which he and his contemporaries had marched and even died are still being debated. Both black and white supporters fought for change, placing their lives in harm’s way. King, himself, ultimately paid the highest price for his advocacy.

For example: Voting rights are still under attack. They were severely weakened in an infamous 2013 Supreme Court decision that allowed several states, mostly in the South, to change their election laws without advance federal approval.

Also take a look at the following article titled, “Martin Luther King’s Call to ‘Give Us the Ballot’ Is as Relevant Today as It Was in 1957″:

The achievement of full voting rights—and of a political process that encouraged participation by all Americans—became an essential goal for African-Americans who battled against Jim Crow segregation. It also galvanized the movements that took inspiration from the civil rights campaigners of the 1960s and demanded representation for Latinos, Native Americans, young people, women, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, people of varying faith traditions, and people with disabilities.

This vision of voter justice came to be broadly accepted in the 1960s and early 1970s, as Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and as the overwhelming majority of states approved the 24th Amendment to the Constitution, which banned the poll tax and finally barred economic barriers to voting, and the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age to 18.