The ride for voting rights: Inside the journey to build Black voting power

Yet, in myriad ways, the true destination is freedom.Black Voters Matter has embarked on what the national advocacy and policy group has christened a Freedom Ride for Voting Rights. Its goals, BVM co-founders LaTosha Brown and Cliff Albright note, are threefold: to amplify the need for federal voting rights legislation, build Black voting power, and advocate for Washington, D.C., statehood.The tour comes in the post-Trump era, with at least 47 states having introduced mostly Republican-sponsored bills that critics charge are intended to restrict or limit voting access in ways that would have an outsize impact on Black voters. Already in states such as Georgia, controversial measures have become law.“State legislatures across the country are actively working to undermine our rights and strip us of our most basic freedoms,” said Brown, a Selma, Alabama, native who joined forces in 2016 with Albright, a native of the Bronx borough of New York City. Civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Fannie Lou Hamer, Stokely Carmichael and Julian Bond had been known to find refuge on campus or speak at the historic Woodworth Chapel of “Mother Tougaloo.” Last week, riders disembarking the bus were greeted by a crowd including some snapping selfies in front of the eye-catching "Blackest Bus in America.” The 45-foot coach is adorned with Afrocentric liberation hues of black, red and green. We’ve got this!’ And we know what we must do in this era: fight for justice.” Brown, an accomplished singer, opened with the civil rights-era anthem, “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize.” “Know the first thing we did right/Was the day we started to fight/Keep your eye on the prize hold on, hold on.”She next asked the audience “to get centered” and close their eyes for a rhetorical question: “What would America look like without racism?”“You’ve got to dream big,” she continued, sharing her vision of an equitable nation in which everyone was treated with “love, dignity and respect.” But until that happens, she said, “We who believe in freedom shall not rest.”Albright, sporting a BVM baseball cap, poured libations to the ancestors. Their grassroots work to increase voter registration and turnout, advocate for policies to expand voting rights and access, and help develop infrastructure where little or none exists for Black voters have proven critical to the nation’s electoral process.Albright had harsh words for Senate Republicans who blocked debate of the For The People Act this week.