Dr. John E. Warren…Why MLK said why we must vote

On May 17, 1957, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was among a number of Civil Rights leaders who gathered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to speak to a crowd of 20,000 people who gathered for the implementation of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court some three years earlier. In his speech, which was given some eight years before the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Dr. King laid out the importance of “us Black people having the right to vote.” He said:& & “Give us the ballot, (the right to vote) and we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights; Give us the ballot (yes), and we will no longer plead to the federal government for passage of an anti-lynching law, we will by the power of our vote write the law on the status books of the South and bring an end to the dastardly acts of the hooded perpetrators of violence. Give us the ballot, and we will transform the salient misdeeds of bloodthirsty mobs into calculated good deeds of orderly citizens; Give us the ballot, and we will fill our legislative halls...