Call to Action: Teach Voting Rights in an Age of Authoritarianism

We are witnessing a vicious attack on voting rights, democratic participation, and truthful education. History reminds us that we must organize to protect the gains won through generations of struggle. We can help young people see voting as part of a broader effort to improve their lives and communities, and see themselves as agents of change rather than spectators to politics.

We seek to make voting rights meaningful — not simply protecting access to the ballot box, but by helping young people and communities understand how collective power is built and how ordinary people can influence the decisions that affect their lives.

Teachers can make that happen with lessons on voting and the Constitution, including how to get out the vote, defend election results, and expand voting rights.

Join Us: Educating Youth to Protect Voting Rights and for the Ongoing Freedom Struggle

Are you committed to teaching truthfully about voting rights and the Constitution this year? This call to action begins this September, with a focus on Constitution Day (September 17), and continues through Election Day. Sign up now.

We will offer toolkits — including a sample lesson, gallery walk, SNCC Legacy Project booklet, poster, and information sheets — while supplies last. (Encourage friends and family to donate so we can offer more kits.)

Call to Action Goals

The fight over voting rights is also a fight over historical memory, political imagination, and the meaning of freedom itself. Young people deserve an education that helps them understand not only how power operates — but how ordinary people, working together, have always had the power to transform it.

Our goal is not only to teach the history of voting rights, but to help build informed, engaged communities capable of defending and expanding freedom today. Toward that end, we will help young people:

- Understand the long history of collective struggle that expanded political participation, from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement to the present.
- Recognize that voting rights have never been secured by courts or elected officials alone, but have been won and defended through grassroots organizing, social movements, and community action.
- Explore how concentrated wealth, corporate power, and the growing influence of billionaires in elections can undermine meaningful political participation and limit the ability of ordinary people to shape public policy.
- Connect voting rights to broader struggles for economic justice, racial justice, educational justice, and human rights.
- Develop the knowledge, skills, and confidence needed to participate in civic life, community organizing, and collective action.
- Find an antidote to cynicism by studying historical examples of people who organized together and won transformative social change against seemingly impossible odds.
- See themselves not simply as voters, but as participants in the ongoing work of expanding freedom and shaping the future.

Background

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais — a ruling that further weakens protections against racial gerrymandering — states across the country are aggressively redistricting electoral maps to dilute Black and Brown political power. Across the South and beyond, lawmakers are deciding who counts, whose communities matter, and whose voices can shape the future. While the tactics may differ from the literacy tests and poll taxes of the Jim Crow era, the goal remains strikingly similar: reducing the political power and representation of communities whose participation threatens existing concentrations of wealth and power.

As veterans of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) warned in their recent response to Callais, these attacks are part of a long historical pattern of efforts to “control the vote. Control the outcome. Control the future.” But as they also remind us, “Voting remains essential. But voting alone has never been sufficient.” Every major expansion of freedom and political participation in U.S. history has required organizing beyond elections — through coalition-building, political education, protest, mutual aid, grassroots leadership development, and sustained collective action capable of challenging unjust laws and holding those in power accountable long after Election Day.

At the same time, many of the states restricting voting rights are also restricting how teachers can discuss systemic racism, including the long history of voter suppression. Even before the widespread educational gag-order laws, students have long been taught a narrow story of U.S. history that too often obscures the importance of social movements, organizing, and the collective struggles that expanded political participation in the United States. As Courtland Cox argues in “The Power to Define,” the Freedom Movement was never simply fighting for access to the ballot, but rather for a broader struggle to create “space for millions of Americans to participate in the political and economic life of this country.”

The Struggle for Voting Rights and Collective Freedom

During Reconstruction, formerly enslaved Black communities and their allies fought to transform emancipation into real political power. Their organizing helped win the 15th Amendment in 1870, which prohibited denying the right to vote based on race or previous enslavement. But the amendment was not granted from above — it was won through collective struggle against violent white supremacist backlash. Reconstruction teaches that voting rights are connected to broader fights for education, safety, labor rights, and full participation in society. Yet Reconstruction was ultimately defeated by a campaign of racial terror and political reaction led by former Confederates and their allies. White supremacist governments across the South dismantled many of those gains through violence, segregation, literacy tests, poll taxes, and other Jim Crow laws designed to strip Black communities of political power for generations.

Nearly a century later, the Civil Rights Movement again forced the country to confront racist voter suppression. Through grassroots organizing, Freedom Schools, mass protest, and campaigns like Freedom Summer and Selma, SNCC organizers and local activists helped win the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The movement understood that voting rights were inseparable from larger struggles for freedom and justice.

Today, as voting rights and truthful education are again under attack, these histories remind us that we must organize to protect the gains won through generations of struggle. Now it is our turn to help young people understand that they are not simply witnesses to history, but participants in an ongoing Freedom Struggle. Voting is not simply about choosing between candidates or defending an abstract idea of democracy. It is one tool people use to fight for the things that matter in their daily lives: quality schools, affordable housing, healthcare, labor rights, clean air and water, safe communities, and a more just society. When young people understand voting as part of the broader work to improve the conditions of their lives and their communities, they can begin to see themselves as agents of change rather than spectators to politics.

The Zinn Education Project offers a robust collection of lessons and teaching resources on the struggle for voting rights to help uncover this history, too often buried or distorted in traditional textbooks. These include lessons such as “Who Gets to Vote?,” which introduces students to the history of Black voter suppression through the experiences of Fannie Lou Hamer, and “Teaching with Vanguard,” based on Martha Jones’ book, Vanguard, which explores how Black women organized and fought for voting rights long before the passage of the 19th Amendment. The collection includes resources on Reconstruction, Freedom Schools, SNCC organizing, and the long struggle against disenfranchisement.

Together, we’ll help young people see themselves not simply as future voters, but as participants in the ongoing struggle to shape a more just society.

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