Roots and Heritage a big success for voter empowerment

This past weekend, Lexington held its annual Roots and Heritage Festival, which is a celebration of African-American heritage, culture and achievement. Many members from the Central Kentucky chapter of KFTC ran a booth on Saturday where they registered 58 voters.

We also had great conversations with festival goers about KFTC's work to restore voting rights to former felons who’ve paid their debt to society and got an incredible 427 postcards signed in support of voting rights. 

KFTC wasn't the only organization at the festival doing voter registration either. Delta Sigma Theta, Lexington Urban League Young Professionals, Tuskegee Airmen, the local NAACP chapter, the Central Kentucky Council for Peace and Justice and many other organizations had booths and many were actively canvassing the crowd to register voters.  The Urban League also took people’s pictures to create a gallery of public service announcements encouraging people to vote. 

 There were candidates registering voters too, but most of the focus on voter work was led by a range of local non-partisan organizations.  Along with KFTC’s voter registrations, we think groups collectively registered over 120 voters at the Festival. 

As always, our members volunteering were fantastic.

 "The people I met Roots and Heritage were very friendly and most of them were already registered to vote. I thought was wonderful! Someone has been doing their job! I also got a good response with the voting rights signatures and everyone was very positive and willing to sign/support that cause. I had never been to Roots and Heritage before and I thought it was great!" said Victoria Brock.

If you’re interested in helping us to register more voters, we’ll be at the Festival Latino this Saturday registering voters there as well. Email our local organizer Ondine Quinn at [email protected].