Dying to protect the right to vote

Bob Herbert:

Viola Gregg Liuzzo is not a name that rings many bells anymore.



Mrs. Liuzzo, a white woman who lived in Detroit, was 39 years old, married and the mother of five when she decided, early in 1965, to head south to volunteer her services in the brutal struggle to get blacks the right to vote. She told her husband it was something she just had to do.



She participated in the now legendary march along Route 80, the Jefferson Davis Highway, from Selma to Montgomery, Ala. The march was led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. When it was over, Mrs. Liuzzo offered to drive some of the marchers back to Selma in her two-year-old Oldsmobile.



On the return trip to Montgomery on the night of March 25, Mrs. Liuzzo was accompanied only by a black teenager. On a desolate stretch of the highway, they were overtaken by a car filled with enraged Ku Klux Klansmen and an undercover F.B.I. agent. Mrs. Liuzzo was shot in the face and killed. The car ended up in a ditch. The teenager survived by pretending he was dead.



[snip]



Now, in the 2004 presidential election, we're already seeing widespread vote-suppression efforts, from the failed attempt by the Jeb Bush administration to use bogus, biased lists of alleged felons to efforts in many parts of the country to prevent the registration of new voters, especially African-Americans.



The people trampling on voting rights today are following the same ugly tradition that resulted in the disenfranchisement of millions of black Americans and led to the murder of Viola Liuzzo and others.



At one time it was the Democratic Party that produced the grandmasters in the art of disenfranchisement. Now that torch has been passed to the Republicans. President Bush could put a stop to it, but so far he's chosen not to.

Because disenfranchisement is what put George W. Bush in the White House, and disenfranchisement is the only thing that will keep him there. From Republican hacks in Detroit advocating suppression of black votes, to First Brother Jeb Bush attempting yet another so-called "felon purge", to the harassment of elderly black voters in Orlando, the Republican party of George W. Bush is the party of voter intimidation.



At the same time as Bush talks about elections in Afghanistan and Iraq, he and his henchmen are doing whatever they can to make sure that as many voters right here in the USA who disagree with him as possible are deprived of THEIR right to vote.