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This page offers living examples of regular people voting every day to make change in their communities. Take a few moments to check out the content below and see if anything resonates. There are links at the bottom for even more examples of civic power.
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Led by the socialist organizer A. Philip Randolph, service workers on North American rail trains—which in the late 19th and early 20th century employed the largest numbers of Black laborers in the United States–won an arduous 12 year struggle to have their union recognized by the Pullman Company. After this, the BSCP would become one of the most influential organizations for Black labor power in the first part of the 20th century.
1960s
Beginning in 1962, labor organizers Cesar Chavez and Delores Huerta joined with farm workers in California and the American West to start a decade-long campaign of strikes, boycotts, and protests to win broad economic and basic labor rights. The UFW campaign would attract attention from Robert Kennedy, Walter Reuther, and Martin Luther King; and by 1971, they had won reforms from grape, wineries, and even some vegetable growers, and attracted over 70,000 new members.
Learn more about the United Farm Workers Boycotts of the 1960s
1970s
Disillusioned health care worker and Presbyterian minister Wade Blank saw a crisis in how Denver, and the rest of the country during the 1970s, were failing to help disabled people live full, dignified lives. He founded the Atlantis Community as a way to organize Denver’s disabled community, but Blank and the Community members realized they needed to go further, and created ADAPT. In the late 70s, ADAPT staged sit-ins to protest the lack of access to public transport for disabled people in Denver; these local protests would help spark the passage of one of the largest pieces of civil rights legislation in recent American history, the Americans with Disabilities Act.
1980s
Caught up in war-time hysteria of the 1930s, the United States rounded up whole communities of not only Japanese immigrants but also Nisei–Japanese-American citizens–from California and the west coast, scattering them in interment camps throughout Colorado and other places in the West. The Japanese American Citizens League, restarted by community leaders after the end of World War II, organized, held speeches and lobbied lawmakers for an official apology by the federal government, as well as some limited reparations for the treatment of them and their families.
Learn more about the Reparations Won by the Japanese American Citizens League
In the spring of 1987, New York author Larry Kramer and about 300 other activists started a direct-action group, AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), to enact or change public health policies and raise awareness about the pandemic. However, grassroots AIDS activism across the country had already been gathering momentum. One example of that shift in consciousness happened in Denver at the Gay and Lesbian Health Conference in the summer of 1983. With a manifesto called the “Denver Principles,” activists at the conference planned a network of groups of persons with AIDS across every major city in the country, the “National Association of People With AIDS.” After the conference, local representatives of PWA in Denver were active in lobbying the state legislature on health and AIDS-related issues, becoming the public face of the disease in the city.
2010s
After a decade of privatizing by corporate groups in and out of the Denver school board that resulted in ballooning class sizes, school closures, and stagnating wages, Denver teachers walked out. The resulting strike not only won wage hikes, but more independence for them to teach to the students in the classroom, instead of “teaching the test.” Not only did Denver teachers win, but they built solidarity with many of their students, who also organized sit-ins in support.
A twenty-year-plus struggle between real estate and big landlords on one side and New York renters—basically, just about everyone living in NYC—on the other culminated in a series of sweeping laws of permanent renter protections, including rent control. The work was done by everyday New York residents, but organized groups, like New York chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America, and a group made up of nearly 100 neighborhood, building, and renter groups called Housing Justice For All, played key roles in not only keeping renters mobilized and ready to fight for their rights for many years, but also transforming their demands into legislation that could be passed at the state level.
2020s
Beginning in 2014 and through late 2017, over 5,000 people gathered in Standing Rock, South Dakota to protest an 8,000-mile-long oil pipeline that would criss-cross tribal lands; tribal leaders said that according to the 1851 Fort Laramie treaty, the land belonged to them and that the US government was in violation of that agreement. In early 2020, the protesting tribes won a “sweeping environmental review” of the project, stopping (for a time) work on the pipeline.
In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, union organized bus drivers in Detroit staged a 24-hour walk out in order to get personal protective equipment (PPE) and masks from the city. “They had been discussing it, they just decided they weren’t going to work. They called us and asked us to stand by them, and that’s what we do,” said union Vice President Willie Mitchell.
Learn more about Detroit bus drivers during the 2020 pandemic
Here are some links to continue learning how people have voted every day throughout history:
Mapping American Social Movements Project