A powerful response to the SCOTUS Callais decision, which gutted the Voting Rights Act, appeared in SLATE magazine recently. There, Shirin Ali interviewed descendants of three civil rights activists who gave up their lives to ensure voting rights.*
All six MAGA members of today’s SCOTUS should be forced to read this document: they who unleashed untold racial gerrymandering while giving us Jim Crow 2.0.
It is empowering to remember the courage of these martyrs for racial justice and the generous gift they offered so all could vote and have their votes count. “No greater love than this exists than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends,” as someone once said.
Viola Liuzzo was a nurse and mother of five who lived with her family in Michigan. Her son, Anthony, was 10 when his mother drove to Selma to march across Edmund Pettus Bridge to demand equal voting rights.
As she drove home from Selma on that “Bloody Sunday,” a carload of KKK members pulled up alongside her and shot her to death. She was 39 years old.
Anthony, now 73, says, “She wasn’t one to stand on the sidelines. She stood there and got involved in the fight.” Can we say the same?
Viola was a nurse who volunteered for human rights causes. She would often bring sex workers and addicted people home to help rehab them and get them off the streets. Anthony recalls how often she told him all people are created equal and once grabbed his arm saying, “Well, nothing comes off. We’re all the same, just the pigment is different in our skin.”
When her murder became public, certain Michiganders responded by shooting bullets through their windows, burning crosses, and dumping garbage in their yard.
Four months following her death, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. Sixty-one years later, SCOTUS erased it.
Anthony says if his mother were still alive today, “she would be in the streets encouraging every eligible American to exercise their right to vote. Get in the voting booth and vote.” Though without the Voting Rights Act—“that my mother’s blood gave us”—it will be harder.
Vernon Dahmer lived in Mississippi, was white and a member of the NAACP. Many of his white neighbors did not exactly approve. Watching his black neighbors struggling to vote, he advertised on the radio that he would pay the poll tax for any Black American who could not afford it. One night, at 2 a.m., two cars filled with armed KKK members drove by his house, shooting out the windows, and dumped three gallons of gas through the shattered windows along with lit torches.
Vernon ran around the house shooting back from doors and windows. He died the next day from smoke inhalation, leaving behind his wife and seven children.
Dennis Dahmer, now 73, says his father would be “highly pissed off at Americans who are not voting. Voter apathy” has gotten us back to where we are. Get out and vote.
Sixty years ago, Andrew Goodman wrote in a school paper that white Northerners were “shockingly apathetic” about segregation. So he travelled to Mississippi along with Chaney and Schwerner to help register Black Americans to vote. On his first day in Mississippi, the three of them were ambushed by the KKK. It took 44 days to find their mutilated bodies.
His brother, David Goodman, believes that the current US scene is similar to the one his brother fought against 60 years ago. “Vote!” he insists. “Don’t moan and groan.”
Remembering the bravery of these martyred ancestors reinforces our capacity for courage and commitment to a good cause. Thus, another silver lining in today’s struggles.
* Shirin Ali, “Their Loved Ones Died to Give Us the Voting Rights Act. They Have a Message for the Supreme Court,” Slate, July 27, 2026.
Banner Image: “Bloody Sunday (1965) – Alabama officers await demonstrators at the Edmund Pettus Bridge.” U.S. Department of Justice photo on Wikimedia Commons.
Queries for Contemplation
How do you see these stories of three martyrs for racial justice and voting rights equality applying to today’s struggles? What do you learn from their stories?
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ
The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine
Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth
A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality
Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation
Christian Mystics: 365 Readings & Meditations
Charles Burack, ed., Matthew Fox: Essential Writings in Creation Spirituality
Matthew Fox, Skylar Wilson and Jen Listug: Order of the Sacred Earth: An Intergenerational Vision of Love and Action
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1 thought on “Remembering Martyrs for Voting Justice: Another Silver Lining”
Voter apathy is a very consequential civic metastasis of the spiritual torpor of acedia, and Dennis Dahmer’s father has company being pissed off at the US voter apathy. The billions of people throughout the world who are suffering daily the consequences of the catastrophic slumber of 90 million Americans in November 2024 are hoping that the last two years will have been a wake-up call and that common sense and decency will prevail in November.