Democracy in Practice

The fate of our democracy is at the forefront of our minds as we head into midterm season. In this year’s annual lecture, “Democracy, Voting Rights and Black Women as the Vanguard,” Professor Martha S. Jones discusses a new way to look at American democracy through the lens of history. She addresses major questions, including how we have arrived here in 2022 and what has changed in the 102 years since the ratification of the 19th amendment. 

By placing Black Americans at the center of the story, we can look back at the places when democracy has both failed and triumphed. Black voters, from the beginning, have challenged this nation to live up to its professed ideals. Historians are often asked to answer what the past can teach us. Now more than ever, there is a certain sense of urgency to carefully examine our history and try our best to learn as we move into the future. 

Rather than looking at democracy as a dichotomy between winning and losing, Professor Jones looks at how it can be characterized by debate. Democracy is a practice, one that does necessarily promise a specific outcome. Instead, it is a process through which we constantly examine and reexamine the values at the core of our society, culture, and politics. Year after year, and decade after decade, we learn and grow while also returning again and again to the same questions, retreading familiar ground. 

Still, we have no guarantee how this debate will turn out each time they are presented in a new iteration. Like evolution, democracy can be seen as a process that functions but has no specific destination or end goal. There will never come a time when we can all stop engaging in politics secure in the knowledge that democracy is secure. Instead, the future will include more of the same. We will continue to ask and reask questions, and each time passionately engaging in the debate will be essential to the continuation of American democracy. 

Black women’s struggle for the right to vote throughout history resonates powerfully and unsettlingly with our current context. In August of 1920, the 19th amendment was ratified by 36 states, declaring that the right to vote could not be infringed upon based on sex. Despite this, Black women faced many obstacles based on both race and gender. They had to contend with the fact that nothing prevented individual states from using poll taxes, literacy tests, intimidation, or outright violence to discourage voter registration and active voting.  

Black women, for generations until the Voting Rights Act and beyond to the present day, have had to organize and act in order to fight for their ability to enact their rights as citizens. In the 20s, women set up suffrage schools to teach others how to pay poll taxes, pass literacy tests, and deal with uncooperative voting officials. Black women were instrumental in the push for the Voting Rights Act behind the scenes and on the front line. Today, we have the first Black woman vice president and supreme court justice. 

Yet we are not free from racism or disenfranchisement. As always, we must ask who is included and who should be included in order for democracy to survive. We cannot take voting rights or democracy for granted. Engaging in the political world, finding answers to difficult questions, and organizing and pushing for justice in the continued debate are essential for the well-being of the American people and for the health of our democratic process itself.    

You can watch the video of Professor Jones’ lecture here.

About the Author

Stella Hudson is a Graduate Assistant with the Baha’i Chair for World Peace. She graduated from the College of William and Mary in 2021 with a B.A. in English. She is attending the University of Maryland and pursuing a Master’s of Library and Information Science.