The Senate has a lot on its plate, but voting rights is the time bomb ticking louder than all the others. Time is running out to prevent partisan gerrymandering ahead of the 2022 midterm elections and to overturn the Jim Crow-style laws spreading throughout the country.

For younger Americans, "Jim Crow" may evoke sepia-toned images of the 1960s and civil rights movements. For me, that history is not so long ago, and the battles I fought as an organizer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee are far from over. I was among the thousands marching for voting rights in Washington, D.C., last month because everything we fought for decades ago is in jeopardy.

The year 1963 was a hard one for me, for the SNCC and for Black America. I lived in Greenwood, Miss., registering voters alongside hundreds of other SNCC organizers. We were trying to teach residents to interpret the state Constitution so they could pass draconian literacy tests. It was lonely, dangerous work. I knew that my name and address could be put in the paper for the Ku Klux Klan to target.

For doing this work, I was arrested (again) in June 1963, alongside Bob Moses and other civil rights organizers. When I got out of jail, my mother told me I had been drafted for the Vietnam War. I was pouring my lifeblood into the struggle for voting rights, and now my country wanted me to fly to the other side of the world to defend rights I didn't have here at home.

But once the draft board realized I had many civil-rights arrest cases pending in court, they gave me a form to fill out and let me go. I headed back to Mississippi in time to hear about Fannie Lou Hamer and other SNCC activists being mercilessly beaten in Winona. Three days later, Medgar Evers was murdered. Our people grieved.

Amid all of this violence and trauma, the SNCC kept working. We partnered with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to turn people out for a March on Washington to demand voting rights and economic opportunities for Black folks. I wasn't expecting even a few thousand people to march with us — let alone 250,000. That day was the first time I realized that the country might be behind us and that our movement was making a difference and might succeed.

During his historic "I Have A Dream" speech, Dr. King said we needed to keep up the fight.

Tragedies continued, but our movement made incredible progress. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 changed the landscape.

But after the Supreme Court gutted key provisions of the act in 2013, attacks on voting rights returned. So far this year, more than 400 restrictive voting bills have been proposed around the country and more than 30 laws enacted. These "reforms" systematically target Black and brown voters by limiting early voting, cutting polling-place hours and closing polling locations in Black and brown communities, as well as expanding voter purges that cull people of color.

President Biden cannot allow Congress to wait any longer to respond. The Freedom to Vote Act would enshrine the right to vote, end partisan gerrymandering, expand early voting and vote by mail, and refranchise Americans who lost the right to vote in federal elections because of a criminal conviction (mostly voters of color).

Congress also needs to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Washington, D.C. Admissions Act to restore the full protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

I'm turning 79 soon. It's beyond frustrating to have to keep fighting the same battles. I want to teach my grandchildren about protesting, but I don't want to pass this fight down to them. Congress needs to make today's generation the last that has to fight for voting rights.

Frank Smith was an organizer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the 1960s.