Voting rights under attack

Thursday, May 26, 2016 7:45 am
By Rev. Cassandra Gould

... Wherever my mother, the late Carrie Thelma Jefferson, went, her body carried the story of generations of struggles for freedom. The scar on her thigh, a result of the violence that she and other black people and allies faced on Bloody Sunday in Selma more than a half-century ago, was inseparable from her identity as a fighter for justice and as a woman of color.

Like thousands of others, my mother put her body on the line for the sake of the right to vote. Against this background, the actions of the Missouri General Assembly 51 years after Selma, represent a full-frontal assault on the right to vote that our elders, ancestors, allies and my mother paid for in blood, sweat and tears.

Her story, the story of the fight for freedom in the streets of Alabama, my formation as a Christian pastor in a denomination born out of social protest, and my hermeneutic of justice as it applies to the Gospel demand a response from me ...

When my mother put her body on the line in the 1960s for the right to vote in our home state of Alabama, there was a sense that our nation was making slow, painful but steady progress. Little did she know that half a century later in the state we migrated to, the Missouri legislature would seek to revoke our sacred right to vote, precisely with hopes of keeping people – especially African Americans – away from the ballot ...

http://www.stlamerican.com/news/columnists/guest_columnists/article_3423edea-22ed-11e6-9ab6-f3bd98da8efb.html