Jelani Cobb is pictured this week at Chautauqua Institution. His lecture was on the theme “Vote and Democracy.” Photo by Sean Smith/The Chautauquan Daily

CHAUTAUQUA — United States citizens must find and elect lawmakers in favor of protecting and maintaining American democracy.

For Jelani Cobb, a staff writer at The New Yorker, writing on race, history, justice, politics and democracy, as well as Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Professor of Journalism, it is important that citizens continue defend and maintain their voter rights.

Cobb spoke Wednesday to an Amphitheater audience at Chautauqua Institution on the theme “Vote and Democracy.”

“It’s our responsibility to ensure that this country continues to move as diligently as possible in the direction of democracy, not autocracy. History is watching,” he said.

In August 1965, when former President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act is when the U.S. began defining itself as a democracy, he said. What the Voting Rights Act, does, Cobb noted, is preclude the practices that have been used to deny the franchise to African Americans.

Cobb, an African-American, explained that his father, in 1976, took him to a polling place so his son could see who his father was voting for, and how voting worked. Cobb went on to explain that it took him years to understand why his father took him to a polling place. Being 6 at that time, Cobb only wanted candy from the nearby corner store. His father was born in 1920 in Georgia.

“He took me into a polling place with him because he wanted to instill in me at an early age the importance of not only exercising the right to the franchise, but the importance of having the right to the franchise,” Cobb said.

Had his father attempted to vote in his youth in his native Georgia he would have been killed or very badly injured or harmed or threatened in some way, Cobb related.

Also in 1965, Johnson signed the Immigration Reform Act that stripped away the old racist quota system. He said the people who wrote the law wanted to ensure that there would remain a white majority in the United States.

“Immigration literally changes the face of the United States,” he said. “We begin to see immigration from places like India and Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa — places where people who would’ve had a great deal of difficulty coming into the country as immigrants prior to this. These two laws set the United States on a path toward a drastically different demography.”

With the new law, he added, there is a large population that was previously disenfranchised now becoming part of the electorate.

Cobb noted that the U.S. is in a problematic situation referring to the Save Democracy Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights act which are currently stalled in the Senate. Also, he said, that the midterm elections will be crucial in determining the country’s capacity to reform election laws ahead of the next presidential election.

During a historic election in the midst of a global pandemic, Cobb investigated allegations of voter fraud and disenfranchisement as a PBS “Frontline” correspondent in the documentary “Whose Vote Counts,” revealing how these unfounded claims entered the political mainstream and presenting how racial inequities, COVID-19, and voter suppression became interlinked crises, contributing to a long legacy of inequality, according to assembly.chq.org. For tackling one of the key issues at the heart of modern U.S. politics and carefully elucidating what the fight for voting rights looks like in the 21st century, “Whose Vote Counts” received a Peabody Award. Cobb recently co-edited The Matter of Black Lives, a collection of The New Yorker’s most ground-breaking writing on Black history and culture in America, featuring the work of legendary writers like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison.

He also edited and wrote a new introduction for The Kerner Commission — a historic study of American racism and police violence originally published in 1967 — helping to contextualize it for a new generation. Cobb is the recipient of the Hillman Prize for opinion and analysis journalism, as well as the Walter Bernstein Award from the Writer’s Guild of America for his investigative work on the “Frontline” documentary “Policing the Police.” He is the author of Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress, and To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright and Ford Foundations, and is a graduate of Howard University and Rutgers University where he received his doctorate in American history.