Faith, Fire Hoses, and the Fight for Democracy
By Aisha Goss, CEO of The Center for Cultural Power
I have always understood that democracy could disappear the moment power decides your humanity is negotiable.
One of the stories my mother told me most often was about marching with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a teenager in Birmingham, AL during the Jim Crow era. She stood beside her family, neighbors, church congregation and community members praying, singing, and bracing themselves for the assault they believed was coming. Fire hoses pointed directly at the crowd.
They knew all too well what those hoses could do. The force of the water could tear skin, break bones, and throw children across pavement.
They stood there singing anyway.
The order was issued to turn on the hoses, but for some unknown reason, the water came out only in a trickle.
My mother would often say that their faith and the righteousness of their cause saved her from the fate so many others suffered.
I have carried that story with me my entire life.
As a queer, Southern, Black woman, I deeply understand the impact of recent SCOTUS decisions. My elders did not march solely because of a First Amendment right to freedom of assembly. They marched because democracy was not working for them. The right to vote, the very right to participate fully in public life, was being violently denied through intimidation, terror, economic punishment, and law.
For my family, voting rights were never theoretical. They were a form of survival.
The stories I inherited were not polished textbook stories about the Civil Rights Movement. They were stories about fear. About courage. About ordinary people making impossible choices because they believed future generations deserved something better. They marched knowing they could be arrested. They marched knowing dogs, batons, and bombs were not metaphors.
And yet, they still marched.
That legacy lives in me every time I walk into a voting booth. Every time I witness attempts to erase Black and Indigenous history, criminalize difference, attack LGBTQ+ communities, or undermine democratic participation, I remember that voter suppression has always been connected to a larger project of erasure and rewriting: deciding whose stories matter, whose lives matter, and who belongs in America.
That is why voting rights are not only a legal issue. They are a cultural issue.
Too often, conversations about voting rights become trapped in policy language and institutional procedure. Court decisions, federal protections, district maps, and access to polling places deeply matter, but underneath all of it is a deeper question: what kind of country do we believe ourselves to be?
Culture answers that question long before policy does.
As CEO of Cultural Power, I think every day about the relationship between narrative and democracy. Political systems do not operate independently from culture. They are reinforced by stories, symbols, media, memory, and belonging.
When people are taught that certain communities are dangerous, disposable, or “less American,” it becomes easier to justify restricting their rights.
This is why attacks on books, education, racial justice work, LGBTQ+ communities, immigrants, and voting access are connected. These are not isolated fights. They are coordinated struggles over power, visibility, and participation.
This is why cultural organizing matters.
Artists, storytellers, organizers, educators, and movement builders are not operating on the sidelines of democracy. We are helping shape whether democracy survives.
The Civil Rights Movement understood this.
The movement was not only legal strategy. It was music. It was testimony. It was photography. It was sermons. It was community gatherings. It was oppressed people imagining freedom before the law ever acknowledged it.
Culture helped people survive long enough to fight.
Today, we are living through another profound democratic crossroads.
Across the country, we are seeing renewed efforts to narrow participation while simultaneously attacking the legitimacy of multiracial democracy itself. We are witnessing attempts to redefine patriotism in ways that exclude dissent, complexity, and historical reality.
But I believe something else is also happening.
I believe communities are building new forms of solidarity. I believe people understand that identity and democracy are inseparable and are hungry for a vision of America expansive enough to hold all of us.
The question before us is not whether democracy is fragile. History has already answered that. The question is whether we are willing to invest in the cultural infrastructure necessary to protect it.
That means supporting local organizers, funding artists and storytellers, defending truthful education, protecting journalists, creating pathways for civic participation, and refusing cynicism.
And yes, it means protecting the freedom to vote.
Not because voting alone will save us.
But because a democracy that can selectively silence people is already in crisis.
I often think about my family in Birmingham.
I think about what they must have felt walking those streets under the weight of Jim Crow. I think about the discipline it took to believe in freedom while living inside systems designed to deny it. I think about how extraordinary it is that they kept going anyway. It was about dignity and building a future where people like me could exist more freely.
I will always honor my legacy.
Voting rights are not separate from cultural power; they are cultural power.
Every fight over democracy is ultimately a fight over whose humanity will be recognized, whose future will be protected, and whose voice will shape the story of this nation.
And that story is still being written.