1199SEIU members at the November 29 New York City Joint Delegates Assembly pledged to mobilize co-workers, family and friends for a December 10 voting rights march and rally.

The action, Stand for Freedom, is supported by a broad coalition of labor, civil rights and other progressive organizations. It is being held to protest and reverse a wave of laws and policies in two-thirds of the nation’s state legislatures that undermine the right to vote.

“We send our young men and women to other countries to fight for democracy while it’s being taken from us right here,” said 1199SEIU President George Gresham to the Delegates. “We will not go back to the days of Jim Crow,” he shouted to loud applause.

“We are in trouble,” declared guest speaker Judith Browne Dianis, co director of Advancement Project, a civil rights organization that focuses on democracy and race. “Many of us have lost our homes. Many have lost their jobs. And now we’re losing our voice,” she told the Delegates. “We face the most wide-scale attack on our voting rights in a century. These attacks harken back to the days of the racist poll tax and literacy tests that denied us the ballot.”

Browne said that through a spate of restrictive laws passed primarily in Republican-led legislatures, a disproportionate number of African Americans, Latinos, people with disabilities, the elderly and the young will find it more difficult to vote.

She described laws that require a state photo ID, limit early voting, place strict requirements on voter registration and deny voting rights to those with criminal records even if they have paid their debt to society. “These laws are a direct attack on democracy,” Browne Dianis said.

Organizers chose December 10 because it is the United Nations’ Human Rights Day. The march will begin at 11 a.m. at 61st Street and Madison Avenue in Manhattan, outside the offices of Charles and David Koch, the energy industry billionaires who are major bankrollers of the right-wing measures to limit voting rights and of the Tea Party.

The rally is scheduled for 12 noon at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, 47th Street and Second Avenue, near the UN.

At the close of the Delegates Assembly, some members spoke about what they would report to their members to convince them to attend the December 10 event. “I think that it is imperative that we stand up for what our predecessors fought and died for,” said Tyrone Bell, a Delegate and environmental services worker at Isabella NH in Manhattan. “Voting is not a privilege. It is a right and we can’t give that up.”

For more information, click the banner on the right..