National Voter Registration Month has arrived in the U.S., just as the mother of all voter registration efforts—-the Civil Rights Movement—-continues to celebrate its 60th year anniversary in Mississippi, that event’s foremost battleground.

Mississippi Sec-retary of State Michael Watson and his colleagues across the U.S. have scheduled state and national voter registration drives as the Nov. 5 presidential election approaches.

“Voting is a fundamental right for all American citizens, and we encourage those who are eligible to exercise their civic duty,” Watson said. “I’m proud of our continued efforts to encourage participation here in Mississippi, including helping to register nearly 310,000 Mississippians since taking office in 2020.”

Watson and the national secretaries organization are at the forefront of the current drive to sign up voters through this initiative. They want all prospective voters to know how to get registered and where to vote by certain deadlines.

Their nonpartisan voting assistance website, CanIVote.org, is available to provide the required information.

Citizens with questions about the process should contact local election officials for #TrustedInfo2024, and also visit the U.S. Election Assistance Commission website to download a federal mail-in voter registration application, which is also available for voter registration activities.

There’s a sharp contrast (think night and day) between the figure cited by Watson for new Mississippi voters during his five years in the SOS office and the number of new registrants gained through the Civil Rights Movement, a project that expanded exponentially from the mid-1950’s until erupting across the South in the early 1960’s. Nowhere were there more significant events in that movement than in Mississippi during the earthshaking decade and a half that culminated with the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

The memory of the campaign to enlist more voters in the 1960’s is certainly more vivid in Southwest Mississippi than anywhere else in the state outside of Neshoba County, where three civil rights workers were slain for working to register more Black voters.

Early-1960’s registration projects in the Southwest region didn’t work as well as those in 1964 when student activists from the North came down to offer help. That drive put hundreds more Black voters on the rolls, and in time it also paid off with the election of hundreds of Black officials.

In “Black Votes Count,” Mississippi civil rights lawyer Frank Parker’s 1990 book, “The voting rights struggle involved all of the southern states … but Mississippi was easily the most challenging arena of struggle. There the Black population was largest, the resistance to all forms of civil rights the most vigorous and, not surprisingly, the efforts to dilute Black political influence the most massive,” wrote Joint Center for Political Studies leader Eddie N. Williams in the foreword.

How poor was Black participation in elections before the torrid movement? Parker wrote that before 1965, only 6.7-percent of the state’s voting-age population was registered and there were less than 10 Black elected officials in Mississippi.

By the mid-1990’s those numbers had grown to 60-percent of eligible Black voters and almost 650 Black officials, including a congressman, a Supreme Court justice, 22 legislators, 25 mayors and 285 city councilors.

Carrying both wins and losses over the years, the battles fought by the state’s Black voters continue. Recently, a panel of federal judges ruled the Mississippi Legislature must draw new maps next year to create more Black-majority districts.

Watson’s office and his fellow secretaries have scheduled Tuesday, Sept. 17, as National Voter Registration Day and will be staging pro-voting programs all month.

Somebody’s gotta do it.