Harold Washington fought for voting rights. Here we go again

My grandmother met Harold Washington once. I was young when she told me the story, so I don’t remember every detail. What I remember is what she kept: a mug he gave her, which she held onto until the day she died.

I grew up on South Shore Drive, sold the Sun-Times for a quarter at a paper stand at 75th and Stony Island, right in front of the KFC, and graduated from Hyde Park Academy. I did not know then that I would spend my career studying the civil rights terrain Washington had walked. But I understood, even as a child, what it meant that he was there.

I am thinking about him now.

Harold Washington served barely two terms in Congress before becoming Chicago’s first Black mayor in 1983. In that brief time on Capitol Hill, he did something that does not get remembered often enough. From the House Judiciary Committee in 1982, he helped lead the extension of key sections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, including protections requiring jurisdictions with documented histories of racial discrimination to obtain federal approval before changing their voting rules.

The Congressional Black Caucus chose Washington to manage that bill on the House floor, where he spent seven weeks in hearings fighting to keep the enforcement mechanisms that protected Black voters from states that would prefer to be rid of them.

He won that fight.

Now, more than four decades later, we are fighting it again.

I am recalling Mayor Washington because of the efforts by President Donald Trump and many Republicans to pass the SAVE America Act, a proposed federal election law that would make it much tougher for many citizens to vote and is currently stalled in the U.S. Senate.

States curtail voting rights

Republican governors in Florida, Mississippi, Utah and South Dakota have already signed bills requiring documentary proof of citizenship for voter registration or citizenship checks, with similar legislation passed in Tennessee. Five states, Arizona, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming, will have show-your-papers requirements in place for the 2026 midterms.

In New Hampshire, the law has already produced its intended effect: In 2025 town elections, married women who did not have their marriage license on hand could not register, with at least one woman required to come back three times.

The infrastructure of exclusion does not require a federal law to take effect. It requires the threat of one, and the states that were waiting have already moved.

Washington would have recognized this immediately. The Voting Rights Act extension he managed in 1982 was not a symbolic gesture. It was a structural intervention, closing the door on states that wanted to escape accountability for their documented histories of discrimination.

The SAVE Act opens that door again, not with a return to literacy tests or poll taxes as such, but with a documentary requirement that functions identically: neutral on its face, devastating in its application and concentrated in its harm on the communities Washington spent his life trying to bring into the democratic process.

Washington’s 1983 mayoral campaign brought together Black voters on the South and West sides, Latino voters long excluded from the machine’s benefits and progressive white voters who believed Chicago could be something other than what it had always been.

His campaign was powered by a voter registration drive that added nearly 100,000 new voters to the rolls before the primary. He understood, instinctively and strategically, that expanding access to the ballot was not a prelude to political power. It was political power.

The SAVE Act would dismantle the registration infrastructure Black and Brown turnout campaigns depend on. Only 6% of voters register in person at an elections office. Washington’s coalition was built on the other 94%.

What Washington’s record demands of us

Washington deserves a reckoning, not a commemoration. He knew that formal equality was not enough, that the machinery of democratic participation had to be actively maintained against those who would narrow the circle.

His mug sat on my grandmother’s shelf for decades. She was not a politician. She was a Black woman on the South Side of Chicago who met a man running for mayor and felt, maybe for the first time, that he was talking to her. He gave her a mug. She kept it her whole life.

That is what is at stake. Not abstractions. People. The kind of people who keep a mug for decades because a politician made them feel like they mattered.

Harold Washington fought this battle once, from the Judiciary Committee floor, in seven weeks of hearings most people have forgotten. We are fighting it again, this time against a bill that would quietly push millions back out of the process, with six states already implementing versions of it before Congress even acts. The least we can do is remember who showed us how.

Donathan L. Brown, Ph.D., is an associate professor at Northeastern University, a former U.S. Fulbright professor, and the author of five books on civil rights and voting rights. A native of the South Side, he graduated from Hyde Park Academy.