They followed in the footsteps of renowned scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois, who, in a 1956 essay in The Nation, “Why I Won’t Vote,” declared that “I shall not go to the polls. I have not registered. I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no ‘two evils’ exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say.”
