This speech was delivered at the Take Back the Vote Rally in Illinois on Sat., Aug. 19th
The Fierce Urgency of Now By Jean Kaczmarek,
co-chair Illinois Ballot Integrity Project, DuPage Chapter
August 20, 2006 Eighty-six years ago yesterday, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified giving women the right to vote after a 72-year battle.
Forty-three years later on a hot August day, Martin Luther King delivered his immortal “I Have a Dream” speech “to remind Americans of the fierce urgency of now.”
Here we are, 43 years later on another August day, faced with the unfinished work of civil rights in our electoral process, to also “dramatize an appalling condition.”
The heart of election reform is a matter of civil rights. When our votes are not counted, all of us are strapped in a chair and force fed with iron clamps and tubes, all of us are plastered with fire hoses with a force which strips bark off trees, all of us are sitting at the back of the bus...
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