In an interview, directors Lisa Cortes and Liz Garbus talked about how the importance of voting was literally brought home to them and the shifting rhetoric in the repeated attempts to justify voter suppression.
What was your own first experience of voting?
LISA CORTES: I just vividly remember going with my mother when I was very young. And it was almost processional. We got dressed up, she put on the red lipsticks, the heels. And she told me what we were going to do. When we got there, we talked about who she was going to vote for. But what I always remember is she took her hand in mine and we pulled the lever together. And in that moment, something happened where it was sacred. And I don’t think I knew at that point the broader history and the sacrifices and the deaths and everything that people who look like me and people specifically in my family had encountered for us to have this right. But there was this charge that went through me in that moment.
LIZ GARBUS: I really can’t remember. But what I will share is my first memory of conversations around voter suppression. My father was a lawyer at the ACLU in the ’60s. And one of his cases that I remember him telling me about around our dinner table was the case of Henrietta Wright. She was a Black woman in Mississippi who registered to vote 20 days after the Voting Rights Act was signed.
She went to the courthouse, wearing a Black Power button and she registered. She got in her car afterward, drove the 10-minute drive back to the diner and her husband owned. They lived behind it. And before she could get into the diner, the sheriff pulls up and tells her she’s under arrest. “Why am I under arrest?” she asked. “Well, you went through a stop sign.” But there wasn’t a stop sign on that route. “I drive that route every day.” “Well, yes, there was and you’re under arrest.” When she tried to get her husband, they forcibly grabbed her, took her to jail, and she spent the night in jail being beaten and the next day was sent to a mental institution. So, while as white privilege means that, oftentimes you go vote, you don’t have lines, you don’t have anyone telling you, “You don’t belong here.” I did know at an early age that this was not something everybody was afforded.
I’m sure that there would be some relevant news story any day we might speak, but today there are two headlines on this issue. Not only do we have the Attorney General of the United States saying that he thinks that there’s potential for fraud in mail-in votes, but we have the President of the United States telling people to vote twice.
LG: The more things change, the more things stay the same, right? That sheriff who pulled over Henrietta Wright in 1965, that was a voter suppression tactic. That was a warning to other Black voters who might decide that they want to register to vote. What this president is doing is trying to create a situation where there is chaos and where there is fraud by telling people in North Carolina to vote twice.
