The Cost of the Ballot: Voting Rights, the Long Arc of American Democracy, and the Legacy of Medgar Evers
Dr. Don McLaughlin
This essay begins with a courthouse in Decatur, Mississippi, in the summer of 1946. A twenty-oneyear-old veteran named Medgar Evers, who had participated in the Normandy landings and earned multiple military decorations fighting for American democracy, walked to that courthouse to register to vote.
Twenty armed white men were waiting for him. Some of them had been his childhood friends. He left without casting a ballot. He wrote afterward: I made up my mind that it would not be like that again. The essay traces the history of voting rights in the United States from the original Constitution through the present day, with Medgar Evers’ life and death as the moral center of the narrative. It examines how the voting franchise was originally restricted, how it was slowly expanded through constitutional amendments and legislation, and how it has been persistently contested and narrowed by those who benefit from limiting it. It documents the legal work of Attorney Fred D. Gray, whose fight for voting rights stretched across six decades. It examines the current landscape after the Supreme Court’s decisions in Shelby County v. Holder and Allen v. Milligan. And it closes with a call to the specific, concrete actions that are available to every citizen who believes that the ballot belongs to all. In this essay, the word “franchise” refers to the legal right or privilege to case a ballot in an election. “Extending the franchise” refers to expanding voting rights to include groups of citizens previously excluded, and in this meaning is synonymous with the term “suffrage.”
