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Who Gets to Vote? Conversations on Voting Rights in America

Key Figures in US Voting Rights History

Congressman John Lewis

Congressman John Lewis was deeply involved in the Civil Rights Movement and continued to fight for progressive social movements and human rights throughout his life. During the height of the movement, he participated in sit-ins as a member of SNCC and participated in the Freedom Rides. Though he was much younger than many of the other key figures, he was a recognized leader in the Civil Rights Movement participating as a keynote speaker at the “March on Washington” in August 1963 at the age of 23. In 1965 he organized some of the voter registration efforts during the 1965 Selma voting rights campaign.

Nicholas De Belleville Katzenbach

Katzenbach served as Deputy Attorney General from 1962 to 1965 and became attorney general in 1965. He is widely credited with helping to write the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and then leading the Justice Department in its enforcement.

Fannie Lou Hamer

Activist Fannie Lou Hamer was an essential part of securing both civil and voting rights for African Americans in her home state of Mississippi, as well as the United States through her involvement in SNCC & Freedom Summer. The child of sharecroppers, Hamer was routinely beaten and injured in her efforts to secure civil and voting rights, including being removed from a white-only sit-in in South Carolina in 1963; she sustained lifelong injuries including a blood clot in her eye, leg, and kidney damage. A powerful speaker, President Lyndon Johnson held a televised press conference to block a speech she gave at the 1964  Democratic National Convention on the realities of racial prejudice in the South. She implemented the Freedom Farm Cooperative in 1969, which bought land that African Americans could own and farm, this eventually turned into over 640 acres with 200 units of low-income housing, a coop store, a boutique, and a sewing enterprise. Hamer succumbed to breast cancer at the age of 59 in 1977.

Civil Rights Attorney John Doar

Lawyer John Dora helped investigate and prosecuted crimes related to the killings of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, three civil rights volunteers who were killed while participating in a voter registration drive in Meridian, Mississippi. Doar also represented the Justice Department’s effort to protect marchers for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Stanton is one of the leading philosophers of the women's rights and suffrage movements. She formulated the agenda for women's rights that guided the struggle into the 20th century. She and Lucretia Mott met at a World-Anti Slavery Convention that excluded women from proceedings and together in 1848, they held the first Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, NY. Stanton authored, “The Declaration of Sentiments,” which demanded social and legal changes to elevate women’s place in society. It listed grievances from the inability to control their wages and property or the difficulty in gaining custody in divorce to the lack of the right to vote.

Carrie Chapman Catt

Joining the Iowa Woman Suffrage Association in the late 1880s, Carrie Chapman Catt was a suffragist who helped secure American women’s voting rights. She was the director of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) after Susan B. Anthony. In this role, she gave nationwide speeches and helped organize suffrage chapters. She helped bring women into political spheres by founding the League of Women Voters in 1920.