https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4616200/martin-luther-king-jrs-march-ballot-boxes-speech
People familiar with far right news sources would have heard of the Ray Epps conspiracy. Ex-president Trump recently brought up this name up to try to place himself as “leader” of the mob that has built up around this conspiracy. But the story of Henry Eppes (1831–1917) is much more interesting. This may have been the man Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. referred to in his March on the Ballot Box speech.
Henry Eppes was born into slavery but lived through the U.S. Civil War into the time of reconstruction. He was one of the first Black Americans in U.S. Congress. He pushed for Black American education, integration and voting rights nearly a century before Dr. King shared his dream.
But poll taxes, voter literacy tests, threats, lynching and KKK terrorism raised barriers against voting and destroyed the progress that was being made during reconstruction. Henry Eppes saw that his time in congress was ending and that these barriers made it unlikely that he would see his dream fulfilled in his lifetime, he said, “we will come again bye and bye.”
Here we are in the 21st century and this time it is members of the Republican party who are engaged in voter suppression. Voter ID is tied to voter home address and when they can’t use gerrymandering to hide from inconvenient voters, they calculate that young, poor, minorities, veterans and the disabled who have less stable home addresses will be less able to keep their…
