Give us the Ballot with Ari Berman
Each semester, EDS at Union selects a theme and a book as a guiding focus for a semester-long discussion on justice issues critical for faith communities. This Fall 2020, the EDS at Union community will read Ari Berman’s award-winning book Give Us The Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, and focus on the Voting Rights Act and the counterrevolution that has since limited the VRA’s scope and force.
Dean Kelly Brown Douglas will be joined Ari Berman for a webinar on Wednesday, October 14, at 6:00 pm EST to discuss his book and voting rights in America. In Give Us the Ballot, Berman outlines the important role faith leaders played throughout the passage of the Voting Rights Act and in the ongoing struggle to secure the ballot since. Students and faith leaders across the nation must understand this history and their role in writing the next chapter of this struggle.
Purchase Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America
Watch Ari Berman discuss Give Us the Ballot at the LA Times Festival of Books
Read the article that inspired Berman’s work on the subject of the Voting Rights Act
Please join us in reading Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America and share your reflections with us this semester.
About Ari Berman
Ari Berman is a senior reporter at Mother Jones, covering voting rights. His stories have also appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, Politico and The Guardian. He is a frequent guest and political commentator on MSNBC, NPR, PBS and C-Span. Ari’s work has earned him an Izzy Award for outstanding achievement in independent media and a place on the FD200 – 200 awardees whose work embodies Frederick Douglass’s enduring legacy of social change.
Ari is the author of GIVE US THE BALLOT: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction), HERDING DONKEYS: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics, and the forthcoming MINORITY RULE – about efforts by white conservatives to entrench power in the face of a massive demographic and political shift.
GIVE US THE BALLOT was named a best book of 2015 by the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, the Boston Globe and Kirkus Reviews, and was nominated for the American Library Association’s Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence.