By Barbara Arnwine and John Nichols

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s first speech at the Lincoln Memorial was not his celebrated 1963 address at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Six years earlier, when he was still a relative newcomer on the national scene, Dr. King addressed 25,000 civil rights activists who gathered at the memorial for the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom on May 17, 1957.

History has not accorded quite so much attention to the speech Dr. King delivered that day, but the tenor of these times invites us to embrace its message once more.

Noting the “open defiance” that was preventing implementation of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling, Dr. King suggested that the “betrayal” of disenfranchised Americans by politicians of both parties offered the ultimate argument for why the struggle for voting rights is so essential to the broader struggle for economic and social justice, environmental protection and peace.

“The denial of this sacred right is a tragic betrayal of the highest mandates of our democratic tradition. And so our most urgent request to the president of the United States and every member of Congress is to give us the right to vote,” declared Dr. King.

He continued:

“Give us the ballot, and we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights.

“Give us the ballot, and we will no longer plead to the federal government for passage of an anti-lynching law; we will, by the power of our vote, write the law on the statute books of the South and bring an end to the dastardly acts of the hooded perpetrators of violence.

“Give us the ballot, and we will transform the salient misdeeds of bloodthirsty mobs into the calculated good deeds of orderly citizens.

The 28-year-old pastor, whose 89th birthday was celebrated last month, delivered more than great oratory that day in 1957. He outlined a strategy for justice campaigners that would extend through the 1960s and beyond.

The achievement of full voting rights — and of a political process that encouraged participation by all Americans — became an essential goal for African-Americans who battled against Jim Crow segregation. It also galvanized the movements that took inspiration from the civil rights campaigners of the 1960s and demanded representation for Latinos, Native Americans, young people, women, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, people of varying faith traditions and people with disabilities.

This vision of voter justice came to be broadly accepted in the 1960s and early 1970s as Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and as the overwhelming majority of states approved the 24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which banned the poll tax and finally barred economic barriers to voting, and the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age to 18.

While individual states retained troublesome barriers to political empowerment, so many changes were made in this country that it seemed as if the promise of voter justice was on the march. Reasonable people had every right to believe that this progress would continue and that the promise of democracy might be made real for all Americans.

But unreasonable people recognized Dr. King’s “Give Us the Ballot” agenda not as a promise but as a threat. They knew that high-turnout elections and ever-expanding democracy would, as Dr. King suggested, change not just the complexion of those who cast ballots in elections, but also the policies that extend from those elections.

Author Ari Berman, whose book on the Voting Rights Act took its title from Dr. King’s speech, asserts that American democracy is “under siege.” And there is more than enough evidence to confirm his assessment.

The past decade has seen a conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court gut key components of the federal Voting Rights Act, the extreme gerrymandering of state legislative and congressional district lines by Republicans in the states and the enactment of harshly restrictive voter ID laws, along with draconian constraints on early voting and same-day voter registration. It has seen politicized efforts to purge voters from registration lists. It has also seen the rise of the fantastical claim that millions of votes are cast “illegally” in a country that has one of the lowest voter turnout rates among the world’s democracies.

The voter fraud delusion has moved from the far fringes of our political discourse to the corridors of power, as was evident last year when President Trump announced, despite all evidence to the contrary, that, “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” PolitiFact rated the claim a “pants-on-fire” lie.

But President Trump proceeded in May 2017 to appoint a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity led by Vice President Mike Pence and “voter fraud” fabulist Kris Kobach.

Dismissed by Democrats and responsible Republicans as a political ploy with a dangerous agenda, the advisory commission finally was disbanded in January amid internal dissension, legal controversy and public outcry. It failed to formally document a single instance of voter fraud. In fact, according to a White House aide, “the Commission did not create any preliminary findings.”

Yet President Trump is not giving up. He announced on Jan. 3 that he was charging the federal Department of Homeland Security with carrying on where his advisory commission left off. Mr. Kobach suggests that DHS can take up the work of purging voter rolls. It is unclear whether that is even possible because Charles Herndon, the White House director of information technology, informed a federal judge six days after the dissolution of the Pence-Kobach project that any state voter registration data that had been collected by the advisory commission would be destroyed rather than shared with DHS or other agencies.

This chaos is particularly concerning because of the prospect that President Trump and Mr. Kobach will continue to seek avenues not merely to peddle pants-on-fire-lies, but to use those lies to justify new assaults on voting rights.

What a shameful circumstance the United States finds itself in as we prepare for this year’s solemn commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination. How unsettling it is that the threats to voting rights that so concerned our nation’s greatest civil rights campaigner are still alive in the 21st century. The warning that Dr. King delivered in his 1957 speech at the Lincoln Memorial rings as true as ever.

Dr. King said then that “all types of conniving methods are still being used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters.” The conniving methods of today are more sophisticated and they are promoted in more calculating language. But the threat of old has been renewed and extended. Tens of millions of Americans, of every race and creed, in every region of the United States, face the prospect of voter suppression so severe that it will warp elections and governance nationwide.

A new National Commission for Voter Justice has been constituted at the urging of the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr., leaders of the National Bar Association and scholars and activists from across the country.

This nonpartisan commission, which was launched in Washington in January, begins with the premise that Americans need reliable information about threats to voting rights, and that the information can and should be employed not merely to address those threats, but to establish a voter-justice ethic that says every community and every state should be striving for the highest level of voter participation in every election.

Working with existing organizations, the National Commission for Voter Justice will build upon the research and insights of the country’s burgeoning coalition of democracy advocates.

The commission will explore a range of responses to voter suppression and to patterns of low voter turnout, including universal early voting, automatic voter registration at age 18, restoration of voting rights for citizens who are returning from incarceration and the provision of funding and structural support for safe and secure elections.

It will also explore the democracy deficit that leaves Americans in Washington, D.C., as well as Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and other U.S. territories, with inadequate representation or no representation at all.

The commission, which expects to conduct its work through December 2019, will hold at least 18 regional and special hearings, sponsor national training events and publish at least eight briefing papers, advisories and reports.

There are many ways in which Dr. King’s legacy can and should be celebrated. But the members of the National Commission for Voter Justice are inspired by a passionate faith that the best way in which to celebrate his “Give Us the Ballot” vision is to renew and extend it in the 21st century.

Barbara Arnwine is a veteran civil rights leader and president and founder of the Transformative Justice Coalition.

John Nichols is an author and national affairs correspondent for The Nation.