“Your ancestors died for your right to vote” — did they?
Africans (Black people) in the United States are confronted with the same saying every election cycle, but it’s historically inaccurate.
In fact, there is a just as long history of Africans who once fought for the right to vote, turned around rejected the vote in part or entirely, and instructed Africans to organize instead.
W.E.B. Du Bois (1868 – 1963)
W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the earliest intellectuals to fight for the full liberation of African people in the U.S.. Du Bois’ legacy of fighting for African people in the U.S. began to take off in the early 1900s with the first Pan-African Conference which organized Africans across the diaspora to unite the continent.
Du Bois was well known for his arguments defending a Black elite, but once his analysis developed he rejected his early claims. He used to advocate for Africans climbing the social ladder through voting, but in 1956 he rejected that with his article in The Nation, Why I Won’t Vote.
“In 1956, I shall not go to the polls. I have not registered. I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no “two evils” exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say,” he wrote.
His article made several arguments to support his claim, one that rose above the rest was each party’s allegiance to corporate wealth. Du Bois reached that conclusion nine years before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and he made transition just two years before it was passed.
El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, fka Malcolm X (1925 – 1965)
El Hajj Malik El Shabazz’s (fka Malcolm X) work overlapped with the work of Du Bois. Shabazz was a major organizer and speaker for the African and colonized struggle of the 1950s and ’60s.
Du Bois and Shabazz shared the same analysis of the Democratic and Republican parties, that they are the same and operate for the same interests. Shabazz communicated that in his 1964 Ballot or the Bullet speech.
“In the South, they’re outright political wolves, in the North they’re political foxes. A fox and a wolf are both canine, they both belong to the dog family,” Shabazz said.
“Now you have a choice, you gonna choose a Northern dog or a Southern dog? Because either dog you choose I’ll guarantee you, you’ll still be in the doghouse. This is why I say it’s the ballot or the bullet.”
His speech advised Africans in the U.S. to be cautious of what their vote would bring them. He argued that if, in the year 1964, the U.S. did not “give the Black man everything that’s due him,” a revolution with the bullet instead of the ballot would be necessary.
His solution? Organize.
“Join any kind of organization, civic, religious, fraternal, political, or otherwise, that’s based on lifting the Black man up and making him master of his own community,” Shabazz said.
George Jackson (1941 – 1971)
George Jackson was next to resist the vote and electoral politics. He was imprisoned at age 18 in 1961 and was radicalized in prison which led him to be a revolutionary.
Jackson joined the Black Panther Party while behind bars and built the Black Guerilla Family to protect Africans (Black people) incarcerated in American prisons. Among his written works was Blood in My Eye, posthoumously published in 1972.
There, he reached the same conclusions as his predecessors — Shabazz and Du Bois — that the goal was to organize not to vote.
“Participation in electoral politics organized by the enemy state — after recognizing that the whole process must be discredited as a conditional step into revolution, and particularly participation that tends to authenticate this process — is the opposite of revolution,” Jackson wrote.
His argument rejected the idea that participating in electoral politics, built by oppressors, can be used for liberation. He even argued that the rejection of the electoral process was a conditional step in revolution.
His replacement was organization, and because of that radical outlook, he was killed by the state. But his contemporary, Kwame Ture, continued the struggle for almost three decades after Jackson’s assassination by prison guards.
Kwame Ture (1941 – 1998)
Ture, fka Stokely Carmichael, was a member of many organizations throughout his life. He organized with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, was a Black Panther while George Jackson was a Black Panther, and was a core member of the All African People’s Revolutionary Party founded in Ghana.
He organized his entire life during which he consistently evaluated his work, accepted his wrongs or mistakes, and worked to better them.
In his 1967 book, “Black Power,” he argued for voting as a means of gaining Black Power. However, in 1992 he added an afterword to correct the “mistakes” of the original text.
“A great deal of hostility greeted the book upon its publication. This was most surprising. The book does not advocate a revolution. It preaches reform…All action proposed in the book is totally legal.” Ture wrote.
That same year he did an interview where he addressed voting, noting a stark change from his book written 25 years earlier.
“The vote for me has never been the road to liberation it’s only been a means of organizing my people,” Ture said.
“You vote for once in four years and that’s your political responsibility? That’s the height of bourgeois propaganda making the people politically irresponsible.”
Ture went on to point out the ineffectiveness of Black politicians like Adam Clayton Powell and Jesse Jackson. His core message was not “don’t vote,” his core message was that Africans in the U.S. must organize instead.
Glen Ford (1949 – 2021), Jared Ball, James Pope
Glen Ford, a revolutionary journalist and founder of the Black Agenda Report, was close to those who organized with Ture on the African continent and in the U.S. Ford is known for his work covering the “Black Misleadership Class,” the political elite funded by corporations to mislead Africans and protect wealth.
In 2013 he delivered a speech titled “Break with the Democrats,” where he urged Africans to analyze their relationship with the Democratic party.
Ford made transition in 2021, but before then he trained and worked with Jared Ball, a revolutionary media analyst and scholar on the Black Radical Tradition. Ball’s godfather was Tom Porter who, according to Ball, gave Ture his first gun.
In 2022 Ball debated a popular Howard University Africana Studies professor, Dr. Gregg Carr, on the value of voting where Ball concluded with the same conclusion revolutionaries decades before him reached.
“We need arguments and discussions that go beyond shut up and vote for the lesser of evil… I don’t think we can use Democrats as tools because they are bought and owned already by communities we can never catch up to economically,” Ball said.
“So the only power we have is the collective power of numbers and organized strength.”
Today, one of Ball’s contemporaries is James Pope, a scholar and radical organizer in the South. Pope was also mentored by Tom Porter, one of his many personal connections to Ture and the Black Radical Tradition.
Pope presented the same conclusion as the many before him in a lecture at Howard University.
“Whether you vote or not is immaterial to the fact of whether you’re organizing, educating, and developing structures, systems, and institutions that create a political process,” Pope said.