It was five years ago today that I began to post thoughts on this website, so it is fitting to consider the power of words and the ideas they express. What comes to mind are words spoken by hip-hop artist Chuck D a few weeks ago in an interview. The Public Enemy leader, sitting on the set of The Daily Show alongside his present-day collaborator, guitarist Tom Morello of the rock band Rage Against the Machine, had this to say: “We feel as musicians that we have the universal language and passport to tell the whole world to be accountable and responsible.” The idea of a universal passport is something we all should feel we have in our possession.

     Chuck D’s words had me thinking of ones written 61 years ago and recounted later by James Baldwin in his book, Nobody Knows My Name. Baldwin quotes W.E.B. Du Bois who is explaining by letter why he is not in attendance at the Conference of Negro-African Writers and Artists in Paris in 1956. “I am not present at your meeting because the U.S. government will not give me a passport.” Here’s the thing: Du Bois’s letter was read aloud at that conference; his words served as his passport. As you have just read a line from his letter, you can see that passport allowed him not only to cross borders but has enabled him to traverse time.  As another example of this, revisit his The Souls of Black Folk. Is it possible for someone today to read that 114-year-old work and not be struck by how timely it remains? If one has been paying attention to recent national news, it is difficult to imagine one could also enter Du Bois’s book and depart without thinking of the saying (best expressed in its original language), “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”

     Consider the Republican Party’s ongoing attempts to place as many restrictions on voting as possible. As has been widely reported, some who are engaged in this endeavor have unartfully made known their true goal: to reduce the number of black voters. As if television news viewers had not seen and heard them say as much, they now insist on engaging in the charade known as The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity which is supposed to expose and to protect against the voter fraud they know does not exist. The Commission’s vice chair, Kris Kobach, made himself the poster child of voting restriction in his former role as Secretary of State of Kansas. In an interview this past May, Dale Ho, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, said, “You can tell that this is a sham commission just by the appointment of Kris Kobach, someone who has devoted much of his professional life to suppressing the vote…”

     Why this war on black suffrage? One need only look to the words of Du Bois. “Thus, Negro Suffrage ended a civil war by beginning a race feud.” And, why this feud? Again, Du Bois sheds ample light. “…there was scarcely a white man in the South who did not honestly regard Emancipation as a crime, and its practical nullification as a duty.” We know that feud was exacerbated 52 years ago with the passage of the Voting Rights Act. When President Lyndon Johnson, himself a son of the South, signed it into law, he knew the ramifications of what he had done. Just a year before, after having signed the Civil Rights Act, he later confided to an aide (as recounted by that aide, Bill Moyers, in his book Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Times), “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come.”

     Chuck D and Tom Morello have joined forces with Cypress Hill to form a new, super group named after a Public Enemy song, “Prophets of Rage.” Du Bois suggests something more: zeal. He writes that with the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, “A million black men started with renewed zeal to vote themselves into the kingdom.” We, their modern-day heirs, should be so zealous. After all, Du Bois has warned of the consequences of complacency. “The power of the ballot we need in sheer self-defence [sic], —else what shall save us from a second slavery?” It remains a timely statement — and question. Hopefully, it allows us to see we have universal passports at the ready. We don’t have to be Chuck D or Du Bois to use them.