Schools to Prison Pipeline, Today’s Civil Rights Issue

I became involved in the Civil Rights movement in 1960 and worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the American Friends Service Committee on school desegregation, voter registration and economic development until 1975. In the years since then, I have realized that many people, black and white, felt the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Right Act had pretty much solved our problems of racism and injustice. But this is clearly not the case. In the late 1990s, I was struck by a news article on the issue of felony disenfranchisement pointing out the large number of black men in particular who could not vote after their release from prison. More than 5.3 million Americans are barred from voting because of past criminal convictions, says the Sentencing Project, a leading advocacy group for reform of the criminal justice system.