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Republican voter suppression via lies about mail-in ballots.WisconsinA federal appeals court reinstated significant voting restrictions in Wisconsin on Monday, handing Republicans a victory just months before the November election in one of the country’s most important battleground states.The ruling reinstates a Republican-backed law that allows local election officials to offer only two weeks of early voting before election day. That restriction will have a severe impact on cities like Madison, which had tentative plans to offer nearly a month of early voting this fall and Milwaukee, which offered nearly six weeks of early voting ahead of the 2018 general election. Both are cities with large minority and student populations, two groups that have been traditionally disenfranchised.Wisconsin Republicans also sought to extend the amount of time someone had to live in a district in order to vote there, saying it should be 28 days and not 10. The court also upheld strict Republican-backed limits on faxing or emailing ballots.Court reinstates Wisconsin voting restrictions in victory for RepublicansPennsylvaniaThe Trump campaign’s lawsuit asks the federal court to bar counties from accepting absentee ballots unless they are mailed by voters to their county election office, or dropped off in person. It also wants to block the counting of any mail-in ballots that are not correctly placed inside the secrecy envelope sent to all voters. And the suit wants the residency requirement for poll watchers to be lifted, so that any Pennsylvania voter could serve in that function at any polling location in the state.Trump campaign sues Pennsylvania over mail-in voting and other election issues | PA PostMichiganRepublicans in the legislature recently passed House Bill 5061 and Senate Bills 751 and 803, which would add unnecessary barriers to the voting process and would suppress the vote in Michigan. These bills could have had very serious implications for all voters, but seemed to most directly endanger the voting rights of the elderly, disabled voters, students, people of color and the poor by adding obstacles to voting in Michigan. Fortunately, last week, Gov. Snyder – after hearing objections from voting rights activists, community organizations and Democratic legislators – had the courage to veto these three bills. Gov. Snyder did what is right and just for Michigan citizens by standing up to legislative Republicans, yet now, members from his own party are turning against him for taking a necessary stand.Voter Suppression in Michigan - Progress MichiganFloridaThe Palm Beach Post revealed this week that former Florida GOP leaders intentionally designed restrictive voter laws to limit votes from Democrats and people of color. Florida voters, as we saw in this year’s election endured long voting lines and other confusion as a result of reduced voting hours, voter purges, and voter registration restrictions pushed by Republican leaders. In this article, former GOP chairman, former Gov. Charlie Crist, and others revealed that prevention of voter fraud was not the underlying motivation behind voting restrictions; a GOP win was.https://www.kaporcenter.org/florida-gop-leaders-admit-voter-suppression-was-motive-behind-voter-laws/OhioWhen Ohio released a list of people it planned to strike from its voting rolls, around 40,000 people shouldn’t have been on it. The state only found out because of volunteer sleuthing.Ohio Was Set to Purge 235,000 Voters. It Was Wrong About 20%.TexasLast year, Texas led the US south in an unenviable statistic: closing down the most polling stations, making it more difficult for people to vote and arguably benefiting Republicans.A report by civil rights group The Leadership Conference Education Fund found that 750 polls had been closed statewide since 2012.Texas closes hundreds of polling sites, making it harder for minorities to voteArizonaArizona has a long history of voter suppression that targets low-income communities of color. These communities are less likely to vote: the Latinx community comprises 26.5 percent of Arizona’s total eligible voting population, yet 60.9% of that group is unregistered.Texas closes hundreds of polling sites, making it harder for minorities to vote

In 1954, Martin Luther King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Always a strong worker for civil rights for members of his race, King was, by this time, a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading organization of its kind in the nation. He was ready, then, early in December, 1955, to accept the leadership of the first great Negro nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States, the bus boycott described by Gunnar Jahn in his presentation speech in honor of the laureate. The boycott lasted 382 days. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the United States had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation on buses, Negroes and whites rode the buses as equals. During these days of boycott, King was arrested, his home was bombed, he was subjected to personal abuse, but at the same time he emerged as a Negro leader of the first rank.In 1957 he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization formed to provide new leadership for the now burgeoning civil rights movement. The ideals for this organization he took from Christianity; its operational techniques from Gandhi. In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action; and meanwhile he wrote five books as well as numerous articles. In these years, he led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of conscience. and inspiring his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", a manifesto of the Negro revolution; he planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of Negroes as voters; he directed the peaceful march on Washington, D.C., of 250,000 people to whom he delivered his address, "l Have a Dream", he conferred with President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for President Lyndon B. Johnson; he was arrested upwards of twenty times and assaulted at least four times; he was awarded five honorary degrees; was named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963; and became not only the symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure.At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. When notified of his selection, he announced that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement.On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.

Civil rights leaders from left, Whitney Young Jr., Martin Luther King Jr., Walter Reuther, Eugene Carson Blake, and John Lewis stand on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the march.Martin Luther King Jr. had an extraordinary ability to mentor and motivate young Americans to join together in a campaign for racial equality. He also capitalized on the experience and wisdom of men and women who had been fighting for racial justice for decades. Below are profiles of some of the leading civil rights activists of King's era. (*Asterisks indicate members of the so-called Big Six — activists, including King, who were in particularly prominent positions in the civil rights movement.)MEDGAR EVERS (Born 1925 in Decatur, Miss., slain by gunman June 12, 1963, in Jackson, Miss.) Evers became active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) after seeing the dismal living conditions of blacks while working as an insurance salesman in rural Mississippi in the early 1950s. He became a recruiter for the NAACP and was named the group's field secretary for Mississippi in 1954. In the late 1950s and early 1960s Evers led campaigns to register black voters and organized boycotts of firms that practiced racial discrimination. He was killed by Ku Klux Klan member Byron de La Beckwith. Evers' murder became a major rallying point in the civil rights movement, prompting greater and more strident grass-roots activism. Beckwith was tried for his murder twice in 1964 but all-white juries deadlocked in their decision and he escaped conviction. In 1994, Beckwith was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.*JAMES FARMER — (Born Jan. 12, 1920, in Marshall, Texas; died July 9, 1999, in Fredericksburg, Va.) Farmer worked closely with Martin Luther King, and had been a prominent civil rights activist since co-founding the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a civil rights organization that was the first in the United States to use nonviolent tactics to protest racial discrimination. In the early 1960s he was a chief organizer of the "Freedom Rides" in which white volunteers traveled on interstate buses with blacks. The black Freedom Riders used restaurants, restrooms, and waiting areas reserved for whites, while the whites used colored facilities. The Freedom Riders, who frequently confronted violent mobs, challenged the federal government to enforce anti-segregation legislation that had recently been passed. He ran unsuccessfully for Congress in New York in 1968, and served in the Nixon administration as an assistant secretary in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Farmer wrote about the civil rights struggle in his autobiography, Lay Bare the Heart (Texas Christian University Press, 1998). President Clinton awarded Farmer the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998.FANNIE LOU HAMER — (Born Oct. 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Miss.; died March 15, 1977.) The daughter of Mississippi sharecroppers, Hamer was born into a life of poverty. Although she received little formal education, she became one of the most dynamic speakers of the civil rights movement. She is widely known for the phrase "I am sick and tired of being sick and tired." Hamer became active in the movement when members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference came to Mississippi. She worked on voter registration drives in the South. She was among several workers stopped by officials in Winona, Miss., on June 9, 1963. She and other workers were jailed and beaten. SNCC lawyers bailed her and the others out and filed suit against the Winona police. All the whites who were charged were found not guilty. She continued to work on grass-roots anti-poverty, civil rights, and women's rights projects into the 1970s.*JOHN LEWIS — (Born Feb. 21, 1940, near Troy, Ala.) He grew up on his family's farm and attended segregated public schools in Pike County, Ala. In 1961, he volunteered with the Freedom Riders, challenging segregation at interstate bus terminals across the South. Lewis was among the many Riders who were beaten severely by segregationist mobs. From 1963 to 1966, Lewis chaired SNCC, which he helped form. Lewis, just 23 years old at the time, was a planner and keynote speaker at the Aug. 28, 1963, "March on Washington." In 1964, he coordinated SNCC efforts to organize voter registration drives and community action programs during the "Mississippi Freedom Summer." On March 7, 1965, Lewis and fellow activist Hosea Willams led more than 600 marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. State troopers attacked the marchers in a confrontation that became known as "Bloody Sunday." That march and a subsequent one between Selma and Montgomery, Ala., led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Elected to Congress in November 1986, Lewis represents Georgia's 5th Congressional District and is currently serving his ninth term.ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON — (Born June 13, 1937, in Washington, D.C.) Became active in civil rights movement while attending Antioch College in Ohio. While a student a Yale Law School, she became active in the SNCC's work in Mississippi in 1963. She was one of the chief organizers of the 1963 March on Washington. Norton was appointed to chair the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by President Jimmy Carter in 1977, becoming the first woman to hold the post. She is now in her seventh term as the congresswoman for the District of Columbia.