Ron's voter registration activism began in 1989, when he served as Director of the Mission Hill Community Centers. At the time, Boston had slipped deep into the midst of a social crisis triggered by the murder of a young pregnant woman. This event is now remembered as the Stuart Case. In the aftermath of the incident, law enforcement arrested, harassed, and scrutinized African-Americans in Boston in ways that would seem to compromise due process and civil rights. Ironically, it turned out that Stuart’s husband had murdered his wife and their unborn baby. He then tried to blame members of the African-American community as a way to throw off suspicions of his crime. The subsequent hysteria in Boston so concerned Ron that he began to organize storefront voter registration within the African-American community. He engaged young people to exercise their right to vote, to participate, and to take their rightful place as citizens in the community, by which they could combat untoward perceptions and prejudices that some might use to marginalize them. The young people responded.
Out of this organizing, Ron founded Dunk the Vote, a nonprofit, non-partisan voter registration and citizen participation organization. Over the past fourteen years, Dunk the Vote has registered over 35,000 new voters and in July of 2004, registered over 7,500 new voters in an around-the-clock operation. In the 2000 election, Boston was one of a few cities in the US that showed an increase rather than a decline in African-American and Latino voting. Over the past five years, Boston was the only major US city where voter turnout has increased consecutively, perhaps in no small part due to Ron Bell and Dunk the Vote.
In the fall of 2005, Ron served as Project Director for The Selma Re-enactment March: Retracing the Struggle, which drew over 5,000 march participants and involved over 300 professional and non-profit organizations. The event was a deeply moving, affirmation of citizenship, attracting volunteers and organizations of every conceivable ethnicity, race and religious affiliation, and it received enormous media coverage.
Ron Bell believes that the most profoundly political actions we can take occur when we commit ourselves to help others in their time of need. In the past few months, for example, he served as Volunteer Coordinator for a local Katrina Relief Fund, raising money and providing food for 21 evacuee families, as well as finding them jobs and housing. To combat Boston’s high rate of violent crime, he took a leadership role in organizing neighborhood walks to meet with and counsel gang members, providing them with programs and services for rehabilitation and directing them away from gang life and toward jobs and education. For years, Ron Bell has lived and upheld his commitment to increase voter registration and turnout in the City of Boston. But he sees this as part of a much larger, inclusive struggle: In all that he has done, continues to do, and aspires to do, Ron Bell believes in fighting the good fight to expand justice, to unify, and to nurture a caring community from its many multi-hued, multicultural constituents.
To learn more about Ron and his cause, and how you can make a difference, please visit:
www.dunkthevote.org.
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