Feature: Civil rights activists in LA call for continued efforts to protect voting rights

About two dozens of civil rights and minority leaders joined elected officials in Los Angeles on Wednesday to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) and call for more protection of minorities' voting rights.

Los Angeles city councilman Marqueece Harris-Dawson told the rally that 50 years after the VRA was passed, there are still problems hindering or stopping minorities from going out to vote.

He said there were obstacles to put voters away so that people could not vote. In some cases, polling places were closed or moved to the remote areas so people could not find a place to vote.

He said that in the U.S. presidential election, turnout has been embarrassingly low. In this situation, he asked, the United States sheds its credibility as a model of democracy.

Betty Hung, policy director at the Asian Americans Advancing Justice, LA, told the crowd that the United States was founded on the ideal that people should have the right to vote.

"Yet 50 years after the Voting Rights Act has passed, we face the greatest peril of democracy. There are more attacks on the voters and more discriminations against the voters today than anytime in the past 50 years," said Hung, adding that the U.S. democracy has been turned upside down.

Hung strongly criticized the redistricting measures in many states that will make the votes of millions of Americans, most new immigrants, uncounted.

In an interview with Xinhua after the rally, Hung said the VRA passed 50 years ago is significant, and that progress has been made since then, but for minorities, problems still exist.

She mentioned that, in the last Los Angeles city mayor election, the turnout was only 10 percent. The turnout rate for minorities was extremely low. That means the minorities were not in the democratic process in the election of the city mayor.

Besides redistricting, she said, language is another problem. Although the law requires all election ballots to be printed in English and other languages, including Chinese, many minorities still feel uncomfortable to vote, or unwilling to vote because they did not quite understand the issues.

The 50th anniversary of the VRA comes on the heels of a summer rife with both new and old painful memories tied to voting rights and racial equality -- from the June 1963 Mississippi murders of voter registration volunteers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, as well as activist Medgar Evers, to the recent Charleston, South Carolina, massacre of nine African-American churchgoers.

As co-chair of the coalition to mark the VRA anniversary, Pastor William D. Smart Jr., president and CEO of Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Southern California, an organization founded by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., somberly noted: "The Charleston tragedy is our 21st Century Birmingham church bombing that killed those four little girls in 1963."

It "shows that despite recent landmark Supreme Court decisions, we still have much work to do. And because that work has to also happen through elected officials, it's even more important we secure voting rights for all," said Smart.

Before the VRA was passed, African-Americans attempting to vote often were told by election officials that they had gotten the date, time or polling place wrong, that they possessed insufficient literacy skills, or that they had filled out an application incorrectly.

Some of them often would be forced to take literacy tests, which they inevitably failed.

In some states, voting officials had been known to force black voters to "recite the entire Constitution or explain the most complex provisions of state laws," a task most white voters would fail to accomplish. Endi