Arizonans to participate in ‘Freedom Rides’ to DC in support of voting-rights bill – The Arizona Republic

Freedom Riders will board the bus in Phoenix on Friday and stop at different cities where prominent events of the Civil Rights era happened.(Photo: Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Growing up as a Black man in the 1960s, Aubrey Barnwell still feels the sting of Jim Crow laws and remembers the lasting impact they had on him and his parents.

My parents drove from North Dakota to Florida when I was a baby, Barnwell recalls. On their way, they stopped at a store to get some milk. The people at the store would not allow them to go in the store. They handed the milk (to them)out the door.

"My mother and father poured the milk out because they were not sure what the individuals who had given them the milk had done to it.

That was just one of many childhood experiences Barnwell cites as inspiring him to board a bus from Phoenix to Washington, D.C., this Friday to rally lawmakers in support of the For the People Act, a bill aimed at expanding voting rights across the country.

The bus will leave Phoenix the day before Juneteenth the annual holiday commemorating the end of enslavementin the United States.

Barnwell, a 60-year-old pastor from Peoria, is on the board of Case Action, a progressive social justice group that is co-organizing the rides along with Unite Here Local 11, a labor union.

He and other Freedom Riders, as they are called, will board the bus on Friday and stop at cities where prominent events of the Civil Rights era happened, including Tulsa, Okla.;Little Rock, Ark.;and Greensboro, N.C. Their journey will end June 26in Washington, D.C., where they hope to meet with lawmakers to show support of the voting-rights bill.

The rides are named after the original 1960s Freedom Rides, in which civil rights activists rode interstate buses into the Southto challenge racial segregation.

Some people were remarking that they feel actually somewhat upset that people who really died for the right to vote in the '60s now are having to do something 60 years later on the same issue, said Susan Minato, Unite Here Local 11 co-president. It does not seem like it should be this way. And so it's a continuation of a movement that is constantly refining the Constitution and the democracy of our country."

Marisela Mares, a 23-year-old labor organizer and former food service worker from south Phoenix, says participatingin the Freedom Rideis especially poignant for her as a transgender woman of color.

We already go through enough hardships in life and so to add on top of that, making it even harder for me to vote, Mares said. There's a lot of trans folks that have disabilities that don't really have the time or energy or the capacity to go and wait in line at a polling place. We need to protect access to the early ballot.

The bill would reform redistricting and election security laws in addition to expanding early voting and requiring states to set up automatic voter registration for eligible voters in federal elections.

Some of the bills features and goals already exist in the status quo in Arizona, such as widespread early voting, but others are new, said David Gartner, a professor of law and associate dean of the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University.

The things that don't yet exist in Arizona, which exist in every neighboring state, (include)things like automatic voter registration: when people, for example, get a driver's license, it would automatically enroll those who are eligible, said Gartner, who specializes in election law.

He added that there's a whole other section of the bill that addresses ethics and campaign finance.

This system, slightly different than Arizona's elections, would create a matching system for donations that are $200 or less, he said. The idea, and theres some evidence for this, is more people will participate both in funding elections and also in running themselves. So those pieces arent directly related to who gets to vote, but may influence who shapes the elections.

But the fate of the For the People Act itself is unknown. While it passed in the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives in a near party-line vote in March, its future is uncertain in the divided Senate, where Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., called it partisan voting legislation and said he will vote against it in its current form.

It's probably fair to say that the things that (Manchin)doesn't like are unlikely to make it into any final legislation, but the harder question is,'Is any of it going to make it into law,' Gartner said.

That will depend on the filibuster, a Senate rule that requires a 60-vote majority for legislation to move forward.

BothManchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., are opposed to eliminating the filibuster, which have made them the targets of criticism from many Democrats. However, Sinema has co-sponsored the For the People Act, calling it critical voting-rights legislation."

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Given the filibuster, it will turn on those same two people, the senator from West Virginia and the senator from Arizona, Gartner said of the bill's viability in the Senate. And I don't know that anybody knows that answer.

Minato says that Unite Here Local 11 helped elect Sinema to the Senate in 2018, and hopes she will hear their concerns. We want her to know that the people of Arizona, the people in the country, really care about this issue so that's why we're starting in Arizona.

Sinemas office said that shewelcomes the support of UNITE HERE 11 and other Arizonans for the For the People Act and believes the right to vote, faith in the integrity of our electoral process, and trust in elected officials are critical to the health and vitality of our democracy.

She is a cosponsor and supporter of both the For The People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act because she supports legislation restoring critical safeguards that protect every American's right to vote, and she supports reforms that reduce the influence of money in politics, secure our elections from foreign interference, and hold government officials to the highest ethical standards, Sinemaspokesperson Hannah Hurley wrote in a statement.

Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., also supports the bill.

Mares, one of the Freedom Riders, said the rides represent an ongoing fight against the filibuster in order to secure the passage of the bill in the Senate.

Fifty or sixty years ago we risked our lives to end segregation and to win civil rights and voting rights, and we're still fighting, said Mares, the labor organizer who will participate in the rides. The filibuster is still there, there are still people that don't see this as an urgent issue and I think that's even more reason why we have to go in and put that pressure and inspire the leaders to really take action.

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Arizonans to participate in 'Freedom Rides' to DC in support of voting-rights bill - The Arizona Republic