Frederick Douglass

David Stone, a voter registration activist in my novel The Voting Machine, hangs a portrait of Frederick Douglass in his home.

The picture references Douglass' famous quote "If there is no struggle there is no progress".

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle."

As a fugitive slave in pre-Civil War America, Douglass had first-hand experience with voter suppression.

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/06/voter-suppression-then-and-now/

 

By the mid-1840s, he had emerged as one of the greatest orators and writers in American history. But legally, Douglass began his public life by committing what today we would consider voter fraud, using an assumed name.

As an escaped slave in Massachussets, he registered under the assumed identity of "Douglass" since he was still the legal property of a slave owner in Maryland. He took the name Douglass from the poem the "Lady of the Lake".

Douglass knew on a personal and strategic level, voting was at the heart of any struggle for political and social change. In the next twenty years, he live through a series of election that ultimately ushered in the Party of Lincoln. What he could not have foreseen, was that this same political party, which still cites Douglass as one of its founding members, would one day be the driving force in the creation of strict voter-ID laws and shorten early voting hours in urban districts.