In 1812, the Boston Gazette published a cartoon of a mythical creature, drawn by Elkanah Tisdale, mocking a new voting district in the shape of a salamander — yes, that’s right, a salamander — that Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry had created to help his party secure more votes. The paper cleverly dubbed the district “The Gerry-Mander.” And as Michael Eric Dyson and Marc Favreau write in their important and informative new book “Represent: The Unfinished Fight for The Vote” (Little, Brown and Company), “The name, and the image, stuck. The practice of twisting and distorting district lines, often to a ridiculous extent, became part of our political history,”
Dyson is a best-selling author, activist, and academic. “Represent” is the second book he has written with Favreau, the author of a number of highly acclaimed books for young adults, director of editorial programs at The New Press, and a West Tisbury resident.
In “Represent,” Dyson and Favreau tell the stories of how disenfranchised voters — from the Revolutionary War through contemporary times — lost, and sometimes regained, the vote. The book reveals tactics that were, and still are, used to make it difficult, if not impossible, for some Americans to cast their ballot.
“Represent” is written for young readers, and if it were up to me, every high school student on the Vineyard would be reading and talking about it. If there’s a way to make that happen — let’s do it!
In an email exchange I recently had with Favreau, he wrote, “We thought about this project knowing that many young people are alienated from American politics, and that less than 25% of voters aged 18-24 participate in elections. With that backdrop in mind, we especially wanted to get across two historical lessons: One — that the right to vote was not a given, for most Americans of voting age, for most of American history. People fought and died for this right, and none of us should take it for granted. Two — that one way or another, voter or non-voter, you are being counted. If you participate in elections, your voice is shaping a broader conversation about what America should look like; if you don’t participate, those in power are paying attention, and know that they can discount you, your community, and your needs.”
The authors waste no time making their point. In a prologue to the book, they inform readers that nearly half of the men who drafted the United States Constitution “owned other human beings.” “The irony of our history is that the original United States Constitution, the blueprint of our democracy, did not actually give Americans the right to vote — the very thing that defines democracy in the first place.”
“Represent” is written in clean and impactful prose and organized into three sections titled Promises, Awakening, and Two Roads, with comprehensive information outlining how to get involved, as well as a voting rights timeline, as part of the book’s back matter.
“We were interested in a cast of characters that represented a genuine cross section of democracy’s heroes. The quest for voting rights occurred in the most unlikely corners of American society, drawing in people who in many cases had very little power, in the way that we think of it today. And yet, powerless people, excluded from the democratic system, found ways to persist in the face of enormous odds. Poor people, immigrants of many backgrounds, African Americans, Native Americans — these are the people who made American democracy a reality by insisting on their access to the ballot,” explained Favreau.
The authors give us the stories of some of the early suffragists and voting rights activists like Robert Purvis, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Zitkala-Sa, and Sojourner Truth, but never whitewash the history. There are explanations of how voting inequities, like the poll tax, came into existence, and some stomach-churning history lessons that will likely raise the ire of the book-banners. The Colfax massacre being one of them. Both the Republican William Pitt Kellogg and a former confederate soldier John McEnery claimed victory in Louisiana’s 1872 gubernatorial election. “In the town of Colfax, several hundred local African Americans and Republican leaders assembled near the courthouse to defend it against rumors of an attack. They dug trenches around it, gathered their few weapons, and took shelter inside. For three weeks, the defenders held their ground. But on Easter Sunday 1873, a large group of white militiamen, including former confederate soldiers and Ku Klux Klansmen, forced their way into Colfax,” Dyson and Colfax write. The men, many of whom were Black, who were defending the courthouse surrendered. And yet, “Under the cover of darkness, the attackers lined up and executed as many as fifty African Americansm then dumped their bodies in the Red River.”
Dyson and Favreau started working on the book in late 2022, following President Trump’s refusal to admit electoral defeat and the subsequent work of the January 6 Commission. ”We were interested in putting all of this into the widest possible context, and to create a basic primer on the story of American democracy, start to finish,” explained Favreau. “ We have all been subjected to a storm of disinformation over elections and voting; “Represent” aims to lay out a straightforward baseline of information and history for anyone trying to grapple with what’s at stake today.”
And it does. Let’s get this book into the hands of our high school students and get the conversation going.
“Represent: The Unfinished Fight for The Vote,” Michael Eric Dyson, Marc Favreau, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, $19.99. Available at Edgartown Books and Bunch of Grapes Bookstore.
