Excellent and timely letter to the editor from our President, Ramelle Pulitzer, on the importance of civics to support voting.
Letter to the Editor - September 21, 2023
On September 19, the day of the Pittsfield primary elections, the Central Berk-shires branch of the League of women Voters hosted a hybrid Community Conversa-tion.
Based on our reading of a chapter of Dr. David Moss’s Democracy: A Case Study, we reviewed the history of the disenfranchisement of Black citizens after the Civil War, during the Jim Crow era, and through the decades after WWII. In particular, we looked at the controversy surrounding Martin Luther King, Jr.’s leadership of nonvio-lent protests that often provoked violence against him and his supporters. Would you have decided to walk across the Pettus Bridge in Selma in 1965, defying the Federal law prohibiting this march? We asked each other.
That march, like many other civil rights demonstrations, took courage and
enormous moral conviction. It meant participating in a deliberate act of nonviolent civ-il disobedience. Over 14,000 arrests were made in only a few years. This is just one of the many details in Dr. Moss’s chapter, through which I learned more than I ever knew growing up in those times.
After the Pittsfield polls closed that same evening, we learned that voter turnout had been under 20% in some precincts and under 14% in others. Over 80% of eligi-ble
voters had not exercised their right to have a say in their city’s government. Pittsfield is no different from other Berkshire towns, where voter turnout for local elections is
notoriously low.
We were struck with the sharp and disappointing contrast that evening: For
decades, citizens fought hard and at great cost, for the right to vote. And now large numbers of people choose not to go to the polls?
Governor Maura Healy is vetoing the budget line item for $2.5 million for civics education. She wants to cut it below last year’s allotment of $2 million to $1.5 million. I have to disagree. If students do not learn the importance of voting in a democracy, we will not be able to sustain this type of government in the future, neither in the Com-monwealth nor in the country at large.
Ramelle Pulitzer, Stockbridge
Chapter President, Central Berkshire County, League of Women Voters
ramelle1@mac.com