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Our Unfinished March: The Violent Past and Imperiled Future of the Vote
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About This Book
A brutal, bloody, and at times hopeful history of the vote; a primer on the opponents fighting to take it away; and a playbook for how we can save our democracy before it's too late--from the former U.S. Attorney General on the front lines of this fight Voting is our most important right as Americans--"the right that protects all the others," as Lyndon Johnson famously said when he signed the Voting Rights Act--but it's also the one most violently contested throughout U.S. history. Since the gutting of the act in the landmark Shelby County v. Holder case in 2013, many states have passed laws restricting the vote. After the 2020 election, President Trump's effort to overturn the vote has evolved into a slow-motion coup, with many Republicans launching an all-out assault on our democracy. The vote seems to be in unprecedented peril. But the peril is not at all unprecedented. America is a fragile democracy, Eric Holder argues, whose citizens have only had unfettered access to the ballot since the 1960s. He takes readers through three dramatic stories of how the vote was won: first by white men, through violence and insurrection; then by white women, through protests and mass imprisonments; and finally by African Americans, in the face of lynchings and terrorism. Next, he dives into how the vote has been stripped away since Shelby--a case in which Holder was one of the parties. He ends with visionary chapters on how we can reverse this tide of voter suppression and become a true democracy where every voice is heard and every vote is counted. Full of surprising history, intensive analysis, and actionable plans for the future, this is a powerful primer on our most urgent political struggle from one of the country's leading advocates.
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Reviews
"president, Holder describes the ongoing threats against U.S."
"attorney general Holder charts the history of voter discrimination...Noting that since the Supreme Court 'gutted' the Voting Rights Act in 2013, more than two dozen states 'have instituted draconian anti-voting laws that clearly and intentionally have a disproportionate impact on communities of color,' Holder documents disagreements among the Founders over whether to 'expand the franchise' to propertyless whites, and details the progress and reversal of Black voting rights after the Civil War and the campaign for women's suffrage...His proposals for fixing the problem include automatic voter registration and passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act...Lucid history lessons and concrete solutions make this an essential primer on a hot-button political issue."
"Holder writes critically, but he also offers a positive program for change that insists that only by popular actions, such as voter drives and demands for electoral fairness on the part of elected officials, will that change come...It can be done, he adds; part of the work is over the long haul, exemplified by the decades it took women to earn the right to vote, to say nothing of Black and Native American constituencies...Another part is the kind of direct action that recently forced the Texas legislature to withdraw the most retrograde provisions of a packet of voter-suppression measures...A powerful defense of democracy coupled with a thoughtful survey of the struggle for civil rights."
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