Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Presidential Transition
Voting rights remained a central issue in the 2020 Election
Martin Luther King Day is generally a federal holiday during which politicians on both sides of the aisle praise the civil rights leader and affirm a commitment to achieve racial equity.
King’s legacy is almost too long to list; he led the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, helped organize the 1963 March on Washington, and helped organize two of the three Selma to Montgomery marches, among other acts of political protest. The marches from Selma to Montgomery in particular highlighted racial injustices that Southern Blacks faced in registering to vote, leading to the eventual passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The Voting Rights Act gave the Fifteenth Amendment teeth. Black and African American citizens in the American South registered to vote by the hundreds of thousands in the years following the act’s passage.
Fast forward to the 2020 presidential election season. President Donald Trump alleged, even before the first votes were cast, that absentee ballots would “rig” the election against him. Following the election, Trump’s campaign and his personal lawyer went on a crusade to file lawsuits alleging massive voter fraud primarily in areas with large Black populations.
