Represent: The Unfinished Right for the Vote
By Michael Eric Dyson & Marc Favreau
Little Brown and Company, 2024
LIke the low end of its target audience, “Represent: The Unfinished Right for the Vote” is a bit of a tweener, part history, part polemic and part call for activism. Authors Michael Eric Dyson and Marc Favreau, whose previous work “Unequal: A Story of America” won a YALSA award for excellence in nonfiction for works aimed at 12-18 year olds, took Alexis de Tocqueville’s premise that America is a place where where the ideal of equality – expressed in the Declaration of Independence – ran headlong into the reality of inequality – codified in the Constitution – and wrote that the former could only be achieved through expanded voting rights (10). It's a well intentioned, well presented work, albeit one that may not have the desired impact.
Finding appropriate books for the target age range is not easy as this reviewer, a retired high school history teacher, can attest: many skew either towards sixth grade or graduate school. "Represent's" length, clear chronology, short chapters and plain language made it easily accessible,. While far from overwhelming content-wise, it also introduced many new characters not found even in secondary US history texts. For every Elizabeth Cady Stanton, there was a (Native American suffragette) Zitkala-Sa, who opposed the forced assimilation of the 1887 Dawes Act, or a Willie Velasquez of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, who fought against anto-Mexican American discrimination and segregation in the “Juan Crow” 1970s. But by focusing so much on women, 50% of the population, Dyson and Favreau showed that discrimination and empowerment through the vote were not niche topics focused on numerical minorities.
Dyson and Favreau’s politics rang loud and clear, especially when covering the opposition to expanded suffrage and, after voting rights were achieved by all, the various steps taken – from physical violence, to literacy tests and poll taxes, to Supreme Court decisions and gerrymandering to trying to overturn elections – to either prevent people from exercising their right to vote or minimizing the impact of their vote. The authors were careful, however, not to paint all their heroes in overly glowing tones, e.g. Stanton denigrating African Americans and Frederick Douglass prioritizing the Black over the women’s vote (50).
“Represent” ended with a call to activism, a list of key goals designed to make the US a truer democracy -- abolishing the Electoral College, expanding the House of Representatives, nationalizing ranked choice voting and banning partisan gerrymandering among them – and ways young people can get involved to achieve them. Both face tough sledding in the current climate, sadly. It would be easy for opponents of Dyson and Favreau to overlook the facts and tar their work as some woke, DEI exercise to be ignored; likewise it’s hard to imagine necessary majorities of individuals and states getting behind their suggested changes, many of which requiring constitutional amendments. But it's never a bad thing to get young people involved in these issues, even if they don't presently share the authors' vews, and from the purely academic standpoint one would hope that “Represent” will energize young people to use it as a starting point for deeper historical examination in high school and beyond.