LOUISVILLE, Ky. — On the first ever National Black Voter Day, the Louisville Urban League and other organizations spoke Friday about the importance of voting in the upcoming November election and highlighted efforts on how they’re getting out the vote.
BET, the National Urban League and other civil rights organizations announced National Black Voter Day would be on Sept. 18 to ensure all Black citizens’ have the opportunity to vote and that their votes count.
Sadiqa Reynolds, president and CEO of the Louisville Urban League, said the nonprofit organization and supporting groups are ready to “take the protest to the polls.”
“People have died for Black people to have the right to vote,” Reynolds said. “People are still dying because some of us are not voting, because some of us are not using our voice. You do not have the right to be silent, and staying home is silence.”
The Louisville Urban League has a variety of initiatives to get out the vote, including upcoming PSAs and recruiting community members to canvass neighborhoods. People interested in volunteering with the efforts can do so at lul.org/vote/.
Other organizations represented at the press conference included: Evolve 502, Russell: A Place of Promise; Cities United; the NAACP; Kentuckians for the Commonwealth; the ACLU; National Pan-Hellenic Council; and Frost Brown Todd, a law firm.
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A couple of speakers at the press conference discussed efforts to help register 42,000 Black Kentuckians to vote as well as well as ex-felons who have had their voting rights restored.
The most recent primary election saw Black voter participation in Jefferson County rising as well as voter participation across the commonwealth. Black residents make up 23.5% of the county, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
A previous Courier Journal analysis showed that Democratic turnout increased significantly in majority-Black precincts for the June 23 primaries compared with the 2016 and 2019 primaries.
In Louisville’s 83 majority-Black precincts, 38% of registered voters cast a vote in the 2020 Democratic primary for U.S. Senate,
But there was still a large racial disparity in turnout: In Louisville’s 136 precincts where less than 5% of the population is Black, nearly 50% of registered Democrats voted in the 2020 Senate primary.
Adrian Wallace, the chairman of the Political Action Committees for the Kentucky NAACP, said during the press conference Friday that it is essential that “Black voters are informed and engaged, and they turn out to vote, because we’ve got to put people in office who already agree with the change that we believe needs to be made.”
“The question is: Why do we need a National Black Voter Day?” Wallace said. “And the answer is the same to the question: Why do we have to say Black Lives Matter?
Because in America, they obviously don’t.”
This press conference comes days after Jefferson County Clerk Bobbie Holsclaw announced that the largest county in Kentucky will have eight polling locations on Election Day. For the June 23 primary elections, due to COVID-19, logistical challenges and a deluge of no-excuse absentee ballots, the county only had one.
Voters can choose to cast a ballot at any one of the eight polling locations on Nov. 3:
- Kentucky Exposition Center
- KFC Yum Center
- Kentucky Center for African American Heritage
- Ballard High School
- Shawnee High School
- Thomas Jefferson Middle School
- Valley High School
- Undisclosed East End location
Of those, the undisclosed location (which is still undergoing contract negotiations, according to Holsclaw), the Kentucky Exposition Center, the KFC Yum Center and the Kentucky Center for African American Heritage will serve as early voting locations. Starting on Oct. 13 and running Monday through Saturday from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. up to Election Day, voters can choose to go to any one of those spots.
And through a bipartisan…