This week I had the opportunity to visit Montgomery, Alabama, and the Legacy Sites built by the Equal Justice Initiative. The sites ask visitors to reckon with our history of racial injustice in one of the many places it was experienced. It was an incredible and, if I’m honest, overwhelming walk through 400 years of American history, from enslavement to racial terrorism to codified segregation to mass incarceration. As the Statewide Coalition Director for People Not Politicians, a campaign to force a public vote on Missouri’s gerrymandered congressional map, I was particularly drawn to the section on voter suppression. I walked away with this: after 250 years of the American ideal, we have yet to fully and unapologetically grant every citizen the right to vote and to be represented fairly in our democracy.
As I reflect on America turning 250, it feels as though we have ended up right where we started, fighting to have our communities fairly represented in our own government. My unfinished business this semiquincentennial is a democracy that represents everyone, equally.
That fight is happening right now in Missouri, the state where I have made my home, served as a state representative, and now work with People Not Politicians. Back in September, our lawmakers pushed through a gerrymandered congressional map in a special session called by the governor, despite a citizen rally in opposition, the largest in Missouri State Capitol history. The new map takes direct aim at Missouri’s 5th Congressional District, currently represented by Congressman Emanuel Cleaver II, Kansas City’s first Black Mayor and former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. The new map splits Kansas City into thirds and pairs the urban core with rural counties hundreds of miles away, communities that live differently, jammed together to hand one party more power with less accountability.
Immediately, we launched a citizen’s referendum to force a public vote on the map, a right enshrined in Missouri’s constitution 118 years ago and used to overturn an act of the legislature 25 times. What better use of it than to make clear that the people should choose their politicians, rather than politicians choosing their voters.
Despite that constitutional right and more than a century of precedent, our referendum has met resistance at every turn, from the very officials sworn to serve the people and protect the Constitution: legal and procedural obstruction from Secretary of State Denny Hoskins and Attorney General Catherine Hanaway, open threats, and a documented effort by allied operations to pay our signature collectors to walk away.
Procedural delay has thwarted citizens throughout our history. What I saw in Montgomery was the long-form version of the tactic I am fighting in Missouri today.
Consider the Fifteenth Amendment. Ratified in 1870, it declared that the vote could not be denied on account of race. On paper, the question was settled. In practice, it took until 1965 to enforce. States that did not want Black men voting rarely said so outright. They wrote poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses, rules that never named race but were built to exclude it. A local registrar decided whether your literacy answer passed. The power to disqualify sat with a single official. Sound familiar?
Consider the women who fought 72 years for the Nineteenth Amendment, from Seneca Falls in 1848 to ratification in 1920. Even at the finish line the obstruction was procedural. Anti-suffrage legislators in Tennessee fled the state to deny a quorum, and days after the amendment passed by one vote, that same legislature voted to rescind it. Even then, the victory did not reach everyone. It enfranchised white women, while many women of color stayed disenfranchised, and Black women in the South waited another 45 years for the poll taxes and literacy tests to fall. That is the whole point: a right can be won on paper and still withheld in practice, and it is almost always withheld from the same people.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 finally put teeth behind the promise through preclearance, which made jurisdictions with a history of discrimination get federal approval before changing election rules, and blocked more than 800 discriminatory changes after 1982 alone. It worked. So in 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court took it apart: not by calling discrimination acceptable, but by ruling the coverage formula too old to use. The remedy was declared outdated. The restrictions were not. Texas announced a new voter ID law within 24 hours.
That is the pattern, and it is the one I am living inside right now. No one in power in Missouri has said out loud that our communities should not choose their own representatives. They do not have to. Secretary Hoskins waited until the last legal day the calendar allowed to issue a certificate of insufficiency on the petition after sitting for months on valid signatures, which his own office’s data had already shown were sufficient. As our signature drive gained ground, Attorney General Hanaway posted that the firm helping us collect signatures was “reportedly employing illegal aliens,” announced an investigation, and referred the matter to ICE, offering no evidence, while the company, which screens every hire through E-Verify, denied it outright. The chilling effect was real. If you were Black or Brown and working on this campaign, you could be targeted by the State. At the same time, opposing campaigns were enticing our people to quit. One canvasser was offered up to $5,000 cash to abandon the petition drive and turn over “intelligence” on our operation. Another volunteer in Columbia was offered $1,000 for a backpack of signed petitions. Later when county clerks weighed whether to run the primary election using a map under active legal challenge, they were warned they could face civil and criminal charges if they did not comply. None of this announces itself as denial. It hides inside investigations, press releases, and paperwork, exactly as it did in 1870, in 1920, and in 2013.
Here is what 250 years has taught me. This country never wrote an affirmative, guaranteed right to vote or access to free and fair elections into its Constitution. What we have instead is a series of patches on a dam that was built too fragile to hold. The Fifteenth Amendment sealed the leak of race, the Nineteenth sealed sex, the Twenty-sixth sealed age. But the pressure behind the wall never eased, and every time we plug one crack it springs another: a literacy test, a poll tax, a gerrymandered map, a certificate of insufficiency filed on the last legal day. My unfinished business is to stop patching leaks and guarantee the right to fair representation and to the vote. Until those rights are written plainly, affirmatively, and for every citizen, the water pressure will keep finding the next crack, and we will keep meeting the same men I read about in Montgomery, only now they carry the title of Secretary of State.
America at 250 years is old enough to finish what it started. The people of Missouri are ready to do our part in November, because we believe people, not politicians, should have the final say
.
