As we celebrate Women’s History Month, women’s rights are under attack around the county. From limiting access to health care to restricting our constitutional right to vote, there is a coordinated movement to strip women of the rights that were hard fought to achieve.  Now more than ever, we should take the time to recognize those who have come before us and fought to expand our civil rights. 

Fannie Lou Hamer was an advocate for voting rights during the Civil Rights Movement.  Born in 1917 in rural Montgomery County, Mississippi, to sharecroppers, Hamer began picking cotton at the age of six to help provide for her family. 

In 1962, Hamer attended a protest meeting that would change her life.  She learned that African Americans had the right to vote, and she volunteered to take the journey down to Indianola, Mississippi, to register. Her initial attempts to register were blocked, but she continued to fight to gain access to the ballot.  Even though she was threatened, fired from her job, and brutally beaten, Hamer found a way to register to vote in 1963, and went on to help register other voters in her community. Her efforts cost the rest of her family their jobs, and cost Hamer her health: Later that year, she was beaten so badly that she was permanently disabled after refusing to go along with a restaurant's "whites only" policy.

Hamer soon took her fight for civil rights to the national stage.  Because the Mississippi Democratic Party at the time would not accept African American members, she went on to help found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP).  In 1964, she was among the delegates present from MFDP to challenge the all-white Mississippi delegation at the Democratic National Convention. Her testimony to the Credentials Committee on the violence and discrimination she faced registering voters in Mississippi was nationally televised. “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired,” she notably proclaimed. Her role at the convention led to a change in the DNC rules in 1968, and required the equal representation of state delegations at national conventions.

Hamer continued to work on expanding the rights of women and people of color until her death in 1977.  She has been recognized as a leader of the Civil Rights Movement, and praised for her work through the passage of a resolution in her honor in her home state of Mississippi.

Fannie Lou Hamer stands as a powerhouse in the fight to expand the right to vote to every American.  She famously noted: “Nobody's free until everybody's free.” Her words still ring true as we continue the fight to keep access to the ballot open for all American citizens.

Politico has a great op-ed piece by former Veterans Affairs assistant secretary and Army veteran Tammy Duckworth on Mitt Romney's foreign policy speech—including a strong defense of President Obama's leadership on national security issues.

Duckworth writes: "Romney’s foreign policy ideas—like his domestic agenda—have been opportunistic and all over the map. When he sees an opening to criticize the president he takes it—prior positions be damned. His craven attitude to foreign policy is based more on political expediency than real world facts."

For more, read the full op-ed at Politico.

Across the country, as noted in a New York Times editorial this morning, Republicans spreading false claims about voter fraud are launching attacks on Americans’ voting rights. As a result of their efforts, more than two-thirds of states are considering or have passed photo identification laws that would make it more difficult for many Americans to cast a ballot – most directly effecting minorities and young people. It’s not surprising that minorities and young people predominantly vote for Democrats. In response, DNC Interim Chair Donna Brazile released the following statement:

For years, Republicans have knowingly trumpeted false claims about rampant voter fraud. They know these claims to be false. Indeed, every effort to demonstrate widespread fraud at the ballot box has failed to turn up evidence that such fraud exists. Yet Republicans persist in such claims for cynical and partisan reasons: assertions of voter fraud enable them to offer a plausible reason for passing legislation that does nothing more than disenfranchise the most vulnerable Americans, depriving them of their most basic right to choose their leaders.

Indeed, the photo identification laws that Republicans are pushing across the country are most likely to disenfranchise young Americans, poor Americans, and minorities – individuals who are least likely to have government identification or to be able to afford to get it. It’s obvious that Republicans are pursuing these laws not to protect against nearly nonexistent voter fraud, but instead to increase their own chances of victory on Election Day. Republican efforts to secure party victories at the expense of Americans’ basic democratic rights are unconscionable, and they should be condemned by right-thinking Americans of both parties.