Every Vote Is a Prayer

An inspiring history of the voting rights movement in America, from Frederick Douglass and Alice Paul to John Lewis, James Clyburn, and the Obamas.

At the country’s founding, voting rights were only extended to white male property owners. Although those rights had expanded to men regardless “of their race, color, or previous condition of servitude” in 1870, it wasn’t until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that barriers African Americans faced were struck down. Meanwhile, the fight for women’s suffrage wasn’t won until 1920. Native Americans finally gained citizenship and the right to vote in 1924, and young men of eighteen who faced military draft could not vote until 1971.

For 250 years, Americans have marched and fought, been beaten and jailed—and even died—to win and protect the right to vote. Progress has been hard-won and incremental. In Every Vote Is a Prayer, Cathy Cambron chronicles those battles and urges us to remember, as Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves―and the only way they could do that is by not voting at all.”