What did MLK say about voting rights?

The right to vote stood at the very center of our freedom struggle. I called it "Civil Right No. 1" — and I meant that precisely. In my 1965 article by that name, published in the New York Times, I wrote that “Voting is the foundation stone for political action” Without it, Negroes could not hold accountable the sheriffs who brutalized them, the school boards that degraded their children, or the landlords who kept them in squalor. The depth of the crisis was staggering. As I documented in that same article, in Mississippi only some twenty-six thousand out of nearly half a million voting-age Negroes had been permitted to register. This was not accident — it was design. Literacy tests, administered selectively and in bad faith, poll taxes, economic intimidation — all worked together to maintain a "whites only" ballot box. And the consequences reached far beyond the South. As I argued, “Southern seniority in Congress, resting as it does on the ‘whites only’ ballot box, maintains power in the hands of our nation’s most reactionary politicians” Medicare, education, housing — all ran that gauntlet. In my 1957 speech Give Us the Ballot, I pointed toward a remedy: go to the polls, elect people who understand your beliefs, and translate those beliefs into public policy. The ballot is not merely a badge of dignity — it is, as I said plainly, an effective tool for change.