by W. E. Littlejohn © 2020
Originally written 2006
Updated: 2012 and 2020
“The vote is the most non-violent tool we have.”
Honorable Congressman John Lewis
“Every single vote DOES absolutely matter.”
First Lady Michelle Obama
“African Americans, in particular, have a huge dog in the voting fight;
have a lot of skin in the game -
figuratively and literally.”
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his election right here is going to be straight up gangsta!,” Sheryl Lee Ralph - actress, activist, author – passionately declared as a panelist at the 2012 Fourth Annual National Coalition on Black Civic Participation (NCBCP) Black Women’s Roundtable Intergenerational Policy Forum Series, Power of the Sister Vote. Ms. Ralph could easily have been prophesying this 2020 election season.
“Straight up gangsta’”
elections, however, are as old as mold on stale bread. In Jon Grinspan's opin, How to Steal an Election, we time travel back to the 1800s, specifically 1876. The author gives readers a grim list of vote-stealing tactics - starting with the Postal Service (sound familiar?) , Western Union operators' clandestine involvement, fraud, and bribery, deploying the "U.S. Army to steal the count" - much of which was grounded in violence.
In 2012, news headlines read: “Koch Brothers Among U.S. Billionaires Pressuring Thousands of Employees to Vote GOP on Election Day,” or lose their jobs. Florida's Westgate Resorts billionaire, David Siegel issued the same sinister threat, telling his staff to think twice before voting for President Obama, if they wanted to keep their jobs. (Note: At one point, a call went out to boycott Koch Brothers products that include Angel Soft, Brawny, Dixie cups, Quilted Northern, Chevron gasoline, etc. Complete list here.)
Recalling that electric moment at the Power of the Sister Vote’s forum at the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) Annual Legislative Conference, I was impressed as over 200 women of all ages - a) called on our Ancestors to help us succeed in our collective efforts to defeat straight up gangsta’ voter suppression schemes and intimidations and, b) launched a straight up gangsta’ voting campaign. It worked. President Obama won a second term. Indeed, African American voters “exceeded that of Whites for the first time,” according to a Census Bureau’s report. African Americans need to show up and show out again in 2020.
Still, despite the urgency, I’ve heard some U.S. citizens say they won’t vote, African Americans among them.
After the 2004 election, when G.W. Bush “won,” I asked a co-worker, an individual who always had passionately expressed thoughtful sociopolitical views, whether he voted. To my surprise, he said “No.” To my query, “Why not?,” he regurgitated the standard mantra: “My vote wouldn’t make a difference.” He’ll never know, but his vote, along with others who didn’t vote, might have been the one that blocked G. W. Bush from stealing the presidency a second time following his first “win” controversy. Of course, straight up gangsta’ tactics like stealing votes is also as old as mold on stale bread, evidenced in the publication, Stealing Votes: Constitutional Convention of 1901–1902. It’s also pretty much a thing - globally.
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| https://ukrainianweek.com/Politics/64050 |
For the millions of U.S. citizens who hold the view, “My vote wouldn’t make a difference” (and 100,000,000 eligible voters that didn’t vote in 2016, must have thought that way), I say, regardless of whether you think your vote counts, or you don’t like the candidates, African Americans, in particular, have a huge dog in the voting fight; have a lot of skin in the game - figuratively and literally.
Throughout her presentation, Ms. Ralph dramatically exclaimed: “We have forgotten!” And, so many of us have forgotten:
forgotten that our Ancestors
lived in the land of can’t vote and
suffered and persevered through catastrophic pain and terror
so that you and I could live in the land of can vote.
A great number of us have forgotten (thanks to critical Black History not being taught in secondary school systems) that once-upon-a-time some African Americans who tried to vote were murdered. A White mob hanged Maceo Snipes for voting, but thankfully, is remembered in the voter suppression documentary, All In - The Fight for Democracy. Like 63-year-old farmer and WWI veteran, Lamar Smith, whom Whites “shot dead in cold blood on the crowded courthouse in Brookhaven, Mississippi, for urging African Americans to vote in a local run-off election. No one was prosecuted.” Hence, our literal skin in the voting game.
NOT voting suggests we’ve forgotten, or choose to forget the long running saga of our African holocaust/MAAFA, which, in Kiswahili, means “disaster, calamity or terrible occurrence, and describes the history and ongoing effects of atrocities and other forms of oppression inflicted on African people” by Arabs*, Europeans and Americans. (* “Between AD 650 and 1600, Arabs kidnapped and shipped out an average of 5,000 Africans; roughly totaling 7.25 million. Another 1.4 million Africans were shipped out by the Arabs, between 1600 and 1800,” Duncan Clarke wrote in his book, Slaves and Slavery. Such factual information is not taught in schools, including colleges. “While the Arabs enslaved Africans in the north and east; Europeans enslaved Africans along the Atlantic,” Nobel Prize winner/playwright and author of Of Africa, Wole Soyinka said.)
Many of us have forgotten that, millions of our Ancestors suffered multi-generational trauma from brutal, domestic terrorism – daily – in perpetual hostile environments. White mobs’, as well as some governor-led, grisly fondness for lynching Black men, some women and children, numbered beyond the “10,000” victims that Ida B. Wells-Barnett reported in her anti-lynching petition to President McKinley in 1898. Sam Hose, Laura Nelson and Mary Turner were among that number. Some, like Will Brown, in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1919 (amid the Spanish flu pandemic), were burned alive. Body parts (Black males’ genitals, in particular) were severed from others and sold as souvenirs, a fact gravely reported in a New York Times article.
Forgetting the long list of grotesque events lulls us into a passive mindset, including “my vote won’t make a difference.”
If your vote didn’t make a difference, why do opponents invest sinful amounts of time, money and energy in straight up gangsta’ shenanigans to suppress your vote? If your vote didn’t count, why the multi-centuries of outlandish hysterical, violent resistance - from lynchings and mass incarceration, to closing polling locations and attempting to sabotage the Post Office Service, (which is in the Constitution), like what’s occurred in the current Administration?
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Although many of us have, consciously, forgotten, I’ve often wondered: Does recollection simmer somewhere in a deep, quiet place in each being? Scientific research in epigenetics and slavery, based on Dr. Joy DeGruy’s scholarly work, credibly suggests that, through “cellular memory,” African Americans, generation after generation after generation, embody past horrors and traumas of being kidnapped and violently stripped of their/our identity - traditional names, languages, and religions.
Is it possible that a small, quiet part of us, the size of a mustard seed, remembers the ultimate heartbreak and grief mothers, fathers and children felt when they were ripped apart from each other, like some piece of worn out fabric, and sold away? (Note: Separating babies and children from Hispanic and Latinx immigrant parents, bears a close resemblance. Native American families suffered similar pernicious separations in government-sanctioned boarding schools, “expressly intended to implement cultural genocide through the removal and reprogramming of American Indian and Alaska Native children to accomplish the systematic destruction of Native cultures and communities” Boardingschoolhealing.org reported. “The [U.S.] policy of assimilation was an attempt to destroy traditional Indian cultural identities” states the Minnesota Historical Society’s website. Europeans forced this cultural-genocide movement onto Indigenous people around the globe.)
“History has a long shadow,” Nathaniel Hilger, former Brown University Economist, said to journalist Michelle Singletary. He continued, “When bad things happen to groups, it doesn’t go away. It gets transmitted across generations. It reverberates.” In an Essence Magazine interview (March/April 2020 print issue), actress, Taraji P. Henson said, “We have not even dealt with slavery. We are walking around still traumatized.”
While forgetting is one way to mask the trauma, remembering can be purposeful; can keep the fire burning to act. To vote.
When we vote, we acknowledge that we haven’t forgotten the bone-cutting trauma felt by our kidnapped African Ancestors - men, women and children - who were displayed and groped, including in their private parts, and auctioned off to enslavers on the National Mall, where now the African American Museum of History and Culture magnificently and majestically stands. When we vote, we acknowledge that we haven’t forgotten that enslavers declared it was “their right” to rape Black girls and women (and quite probably boys and men).
Case in point:
Attorney Michael Coard chillingly reported in the Philadelphia Tribune that, “At 10 p.m. on Tuesday, June 23, 1855, nineteen-year-old Celia displayed astonishing bravery.” The young adult defended herself “against another brutal rape” by 60-year-old Missouri enslaver, Robert Newsom, who had procured “14-year-old Celia in 1850 at an Audrain County auction.” Mr. Coard detailed that “on the way back to his Calloway County plantation, [Newsom] began raping her inside his horse-drawn covered wagon” and “continued raping her repeatedly for five years.” Celia ended that nightmare for good on June 23. She killed the fetid lowlife. (You go girl!) What came next was predictable. In State of Missouri v. Celia, a Slave, File Number 4496, the court found Celia guilty on Oct. 10, 1855 and sentenced her to death. They hanged her. (Note: CELIA – A Slave, by Melton A. McLaurin, is based on this heartbreaking injustice.)
Other enslavers that delighted in this standardized, perverted torture include the founders of the United States, from George Washington, the “slave catcher,” Thomas Jefferson who raped 14-year-old Sally Hemings, to James Madison which Bettye Kearse learned in her genealogical research for her book The Other Madisons From his assessment of the “legal” records of that time, Mr. Coard determined that “white slaveholders were violently perverted beasts.”
Raping Black women and girls continued throughout the Jim Crow era, as Ruth Thompson-Miller documented in Stolen Innocence: The Rapes of Little Girls During Jim Crow.) Before being arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a White man, Mrs. Rosa Parks revealed in her autobiography, Rosa Parks: My Story, that she investigated and documented 112 rapes of Black women by White males, including the abduction and gang rape of Mrs. Recy Taylor, by six White males, on September 3, 1944, in Abbeville, Alabama. Mrs. Parks recalled: “I worked on numerous cases with the NAACP, but we did not get the publicity. There were cases of flogging, peonage, murder, and rape.”
Some of us have over-ridden our cellular memory’s default setting and forgotten the macabre Frankenstein-type medical experiments that Black women suffered (for which enslavers were paid a fee). Dr. Harriet A. Washington diligently researched that grim fact for her groundbreaking book, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. She documents where medical schools used some of our Ancestors in “live surgical demonstrations.” Those who read journalist, Chip Jones’ The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South are shaken to learn about Bruce Tucker, an African American factory worker, whose heart was taken without his or his family’s consent and given to a White businessman. Mr. Tucker had gone to the Virginia hospital, in 1968, for a head injury. Some people still support the theory that medical experimentation was behind the disturbing Atlanta Child Murders. One parent reported observing her son’s missing testicles when she viewed his body. Supposedly, young Black males’ testicles contain high amounts of interferon (a family of naturally-occurring proteins), and the all-White medical world needed a supply to create large doses for cancer-curing research. (Interferon is currently being considered as a treatment for Covid-19.) Despite a book, movie and social media, many of us have forgotten the experiment on Henrietta Lacks wherein her cells (called “immortal cells”) were taken from her body without her knowledge and used to form the HeLa (first immortal human cell line) which, since, has been used extensively throughout medical research. (Note: An interview with Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, is here. Oprah Winfrey produced the 2017 movie.) Fortunately, many of us have not forgotten the U.S. government forty-year syphilis experiment on Black men through the repugnant Tuskeegee Study. These are just a few examples that Black lives didn’t and don’t matter.
When we vote, we acknowledge that we haven’t forgotten that, despite their hellish environments, our Ancestors were creative and enterprising in building new forms of resistance and communication. Our Ancestors designed quilts embedded with coded messages that telegraphed safe places to escape from slavery. Even our hair was genius-ly employed as an “in-plain-sight” communication tool. Thanks to Ayana D. Byrd and Lori L. Tharps’ book HAIR STORY: Untangling the Roots of Back Hair in America, I learned and marveled at how our Ancestors embedded secret messages in their braids. “Escape routes were often carved into elaborate cornrow designs,” said Tharps, Associate Professor at Temple University. “Four rows might signify needing to travel 4 miles. A looser braid might signify meeting at a cotton field.”
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| https://vectorified.com/hair-braids-vector |
According to The Secret Meaning of the African Cornrows, at afrobizworld.com, our hair as a "Morse code" so to speak "is most documented in Colombia where Benkos Bioho, a King captured from Africa by the Portuguese who escaped slavery, built San Basilio de Palenque, a village in Northern Colombia [South America] around the 17th century. Bioho created his own language as well as intelligence network and also came up with the idea to have women create maps and deliver messages through their cornrows.
The village is a walled city that was meant to be a refuge for escaped slaves and help them get back on their feet. The most fascinating thing is that the city of San Basilio de Palenque still exists and has a population of about 3500 people."Kidnappers of our African Ancestors “shaved the heads of the women in a brutal attempt to strip them of their humanity and culture,” Dr. Zinga A. Fraser stated in an Essence Magazine interview, as well as “cut off” their communication instrument. Our hair, aggressively maligned, played a strategic role in bypassing the oppressors’ cruelty, and is the only part of the human anatomy that required legislation. Hence, the CROWN Act/H.R.5309, introduced by Louisiana Representative Cedric L. Richmond, in December 2019. (CROWN is an acronym for “Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair.”)
On September 22, 2020, the House of Representatives passed the CROWN Act, which now awaits review in the U.S. Senate. So, when we vote, we honor those brilliant Ancestral strategists who long ago valued our hair, in more ways than one. (Note: California was the first state to honor the legislation that makes it unlawful to discriminate against a person in the workplace or in schools because of their natural hairstyle. “Twenty-three states have introduced CROWN legislation including Georgia, Florida and Arizona,” according to goodmorningamerica.com. Currently, 27 states have not.)
When we vote, we honor those Ancestors who built and managed self-sustaining towns and businesses, like the prosperous Tulsa, Oklahoma Greenville community and Rosewood, Florida, both of which, as well as other African American communities, hateful and jealous Whites incinerated (reportedly, bombs were dropped from airplanes also) and massacred hundreds of African Americans. (Note: Currently, a search for a mass grave in Tulsa is underway, ninety-nine years after the massacre, and, historians found a Long-Lost Manuscript Containing a Searing Eyewitness Account of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, detailed by an Oklahoma lawyer who survived the devastating ordeal.)
When we vote, we acknowledge that we haven't forgotten that the White House and Capitol imposing structures, where politicians - men and women - negotiate deals (good and bad) that impact every U.S. citizen, were built by Black people held against their will. They were "rented out" by enslavers who received payment for our Ancestors' hard work. This was one of many ways, including building Manhattan, New York Wall Street's financial district, enslavers and investors grew wealthy from our Ancestors' forced, unpaid labor, genius/intelligence, strength and creativity. Our pint-sized Ancestors were the first jockeys to win races for enslavers at the Kentucky Derby and Preakness racing events as Edward Hotaling richly documented in THE GREAT BLACK JOCKEYS: The Lives and Times of the Men Who Dominated America's First National Sport. (See: Smithsonian Magazine. The Kentucky Derby’s Forgotten Jockeys.)
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| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-kentucky-derbys-forgotten-jockeys-128781428/ |
Still, through time and distance and silenced cellular memory, too many of us have forgotten or have chosen to forget, maybe because to remember is too painful, the Ancestors who bent their backs toting “that cotton” and lifting “that bale.” It’s unquestionably painful to remember the 1919 Elaine Massacre (again, amid the Spanish flu pandemic) in Elaine, Arkansas, where Whites murdered 200 (possibly more) Black sharecroppers that were protesting being cheated and exploited. Equally painful to remember is the December 11, 1917 mass hanging of Black soldiers in Houston, TX in 1917. We have long forgotten Eugene Williams, a 17-year-old Black boy, stoned to death by white people in 1919 after he swam into what they considered the wrong part of Lake Michigan (bordered by Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana), and the subsequent Red Summer that engulfed 26 states, including Washington, DC where Black soldiers (returning from WWI) blockaded their neighborhoods, surrounding Howard University, to protect the community, about which Ursula Wolfe-Rocca gives a moving account in her Zinn Education Project essay, Remembering Red Summer — Which Textbooks Seem Eager to Forget. Text book and most mass media content producers would prefer we and forthcoming generations forget.
It’s painful to remember Emmett Till’s mutilated body and aforementioned Mary Turner who was eight-weeks pregnant when she protested her husband’s lynching. The White haters sliced open her belly and crushed her infant’s head with the heels of their filthy boots, after it fell to the ground. Did they torture Emmett and Mary longer than 8 minutes and 46 seconds? Did the killers commit their heinous crimes just as cavalierly, with as much wanton indifference as the Minneapolis cop who pressed his boney knee into George Floyd’s neck? Or, the cowardly Wisconsin cop who shot Jacob Blake in the back seven times?
It’s painful to remember present-day police “lynchings” of a horrifying list of so many, many, many African Americans, “that seems to never end,” said Byron Allen, CEO of a major media company, in an essay. Like their Ancestors, Black families today are experiencing piercing, nearly debilitating grief from missing murdered love ones - Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, Daniel Prude, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Trayvon Martin, Laquan McDonald, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Jordan Baker, Freddie Gray, Walter Scott (the South Carolina murderer/cop got 20 years), Samuel Dubose, Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, Atatiana Jefferson, George Robinson, Mario Clark, Dennis Plowden, Oscar Grant, James Scurlock, William Green, David McAtee, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Jonathan Price, Philando Castile. None of these citizens can vote.
I keep hearing people say they are perplexed as to "why" the police disregard Black life so blasé, so nonchalantly, even when they know they’re being videotaped. Sylvia Wynter answers to that question in her open letter, NO HUMANS INVOLVED - a police response code for Black and Brown victims. “In the 1980s of America, police in LA used to refer to the murders of prostitutes, gang members, and drugs addicts (majority Black and in poverty) as NHI, ‘No Humans Involved.’ This attitude is still prevalent today,” penned a writer on urbandictionary.com. With a NHI mentality, killing Black people so matter-of-factly, so dispassionately, is a no-brainer, as it seemed to have been for the murderers of George Floyd, Jonathan Price, and all the other victims. Steven W. Thrasher was on point when he declared, “Police hunt and kill black people like Philando Castile. There's no justice” in The Guardian. It could be said that some got a freakish thrill, even delight, in snuffing out a Black life. Does being videotaped enhance an opportunity to relive Clint Eastwood’s movie character who points a gun in a Black man’s face and growls: “Make my day,” thus, intensifying the “pleasure”? One cop boldly stated to a White woman who expressed fear when he stopped her car, “We kill Black people.” (Note: How Racist Policing Took Over American Cities, Explained by A Historian also addresses that “why,” which began with “policing” held hostage in slavery, making sure none left the plantation - called "concentration camp" by a friend. Forbes Magazine - Police Shootings and African Americans.)
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| https://www.azquotes.com/author/795-Ella_Baker |
When we vote, we acknowledge that we haven’t forgotten Ella Baker, founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), who fiercely fought for social justice. We acknowledge that we haven’t forgotten the unimaginable courage, discipline and strength it took to be “weak” enough to maintain dignity when passive resistance met the volcanic violence of White haters who crushed lit cigarettes into the flesh of Black “sit-in” protesters at lunch counters. We acknowledge that we haven’t forgotten the unimaginable courage, discipline and strength it took to be “weak” enough to maintain dignity when passive resistance met the White terrorists that set the Freedom Riders’ bus ablaze, causing the fuel tank to explode, on May 14, 1961, in Anniston, AL, in a failed attempt to burn alive the Black and White volunteers on a mission to Integrate buses and waiting rooms.
Like scenes from an edge-of-your-seat suspense thriller, riders, choking from smoke inhalation, stumbled off the Greyhound bus into the hands of the cowards who beat them mercilessly. It’s not clear how they made it to the segregated Anniston Memorial Hospital, where my great aunt, Willie Mae Curry, was a nurse in the “Colored” ward. But, she and the few Black healthcare professionals were prevented from offering aid by a mob of violent Whites. As far as we know, no one in Anniston’s African American community, probably in fear of their own lives (including my grandfather, Henry Pierce, or cousins in the Sanders family), came to the Riders’ aid. As some of the injured – bleeding, broken and stunned – sat on the side of a road, they got some relief, when a caravan of ten or more cars arrived and drove them to Birmingham to be treated by, I suspect, Black doctors and sympathetic Whites. The commanding and influential Civil Rights activist, Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, had dispatched deacons from his Birmingham, Alabama Bethel Baptist Church, to Anniston (65 miles northeast), to rescue the Riders. Whites bombed Rev. Shuttlesworth’s home afterwards. Thankfully, no one was hurt.
The companion Trailways bus, that had taken another route, carrying another group of Freedom Riders arrived in Birmingham and were surrounded by nearly a thousand hate-filled Whites. No bus-burning this time, but the mob beat the faces of Black and White men and women to a bloody pulp. Among the mob stood White women, holding babies and standing with children, polluted the air with venomous name calling. Still, dignity, discipline, courage, strength and commitment prevailed, as, like waves in the ocean, the Riders kept rolling. The next group, led by a young civil rights activist, Diane Nash, strategized to roll from Tennessee into Birmingham, where they met the same volcanic violence.
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| John Lewis, Diane Nash, Stokley Carmichael to right of Lewis |
Before leaving Tennessee, the Riders - Black and White - had signed their “last will and testament.” We have forgotten that the dramatic movement, which the world was watching, prompted then Attorney General, Robert Kennedy to bark: “WHO THE HELL IS DIANE NASH?!!” The Riders met the same demonic wall of hate in Montgomery, Alabama. The violence and hate in Mississippi took the form of incarceration in the notorious Parchman Prison. John Lewis, SNCC’s Stokely Carmichael and Joan Trumpauer were among those arrested and incarcerated. Carmichael - 51 days. Trumpauer - over 60 days. The late, Congressman John Lewis - 37 days. (Note: Stanley Nelson’s documentary, Freedom Riders, gives a dramatic visual narrative of the heroism of the Riders amidst the terrifying attacks. Raymond Arsenault’s Freedom Riders and npr.org provide disturbing documentation also.)
In forgetting, we take for
granted the “freedom” to sit anywhere we please in restaurants, on buses and
trains and in waiting rooms. On that particular issue, we forget Irene Morgan’s
courage (before
15-year-old Claudette
Colvin was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a White
man in Montgomery, Alabama, six months before Rosa
Parks’ arrest) who sustained
multiple bruises when the White bus driver and police forced her off a
Greyhound bus in 1944. The 28-year-old had refused to move to the back of the bus so White passengers could sit.
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| https://www.historynet.com/before-rosa-parks.htm |
Her win in Morgan v. Virginia resulted in the unprecedented law that allowed Black people and other people of color to sit anywhere on Interstate buses, trains and waiting rooms. Southern states disdainfully disregarded that Federal law. Hence, the Freedom Riders’ stroke of genius.
When we vote, we acknowledge that we haven’t forgotten the men, women and teenagers who maintained their dignity as hateful Whites beat them, ran over them on police-mounted horses; blasted them with fire hoses’ hurricane gusts of water, against brick buildings’ walls and down asphalt streets; attacked them with vicious police dogs, pulled their hair, spat in their faces, bloodied their heads, kicked them in the back and stomach - wherever their feet, sticks and stones would land. Nor the young minds and bodies of six-year-olds Ruby Bridges and the McDonogh Three (Leona Tate, Tessie Prevost and Gail Etienne), and The Little Rock Nine, who withstood jet streams of toxic vitriol from hateful mobs. Nor James Meredith who faced boiling White hate that left many arrested, hundreds wounded and two dead, when he attempted to enroll at the all-white University of Mississippi in 1962. (Still, on August 18, 1963, he graduated from the University with a degree in Political Science.) Each, fought through their fears and the temptation to flee, fight, cry, scream or faint, and bravely put one foot in front of the other and walked through hostile White mobs spewing poisonous expletives like packs of wild rabid dogs, and solemnly entered unwelcoming all-white schools. This same hate-filled, savage behavior was demonstrated against protestors by the raging White supremacist militia member who shot and killed two White men, Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, this summer. In 2017, a hate-filled racist sped his car into a crowd of protestors and murdered Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, VA. Another did the same, killing Summer Taylor (a White man) in Seattle Washington in 2020. Each victim was protesting hate/police violence and supporting Black Lives Matter. (Note: The Problem We All Live With, a 1964 painting by Norman Rockwell, portrays Ruby Bridges walking to school, books in arms, uniformed guards walking in front and behind her.)
When we vote, we acknowledge that we haven’t forgotten that those Whites consumed with hate constructed, planted and set off 50 bombs against African Americans. One, placed in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, in 1963, in Birmingham, AL, killed three 14-year-olds, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, and Carole Robertson and one 11-year-old, Denise McNair. When we vote, we acknowledge that we haven’t forgotten the fifteen teenage (12 to 15-year old) African American girls arrested for protesting inequality. Anxious parents were not notified of the girls’ arrest and didn’t know they were locked in a dilapidated Civil War, Lee County Stockade, in Leesburg, Americus, Georgia. After release, 45 days later, the parents were forced to pay $2 a night for a “boarding” fee. (Note: Click Hidden Herstory: The Leesburg Stockade Girls to see an article and video in which some of the girls, now women, were interviewed. A portion of the Essence Magazine, December 2009 story, Stolen Girls, is here. A historical marker now cites that concentration camp of brutality and possibly rape.)
When we vote, we acknowledge that we haven’t forgotten that, when Fannie Lou Hamer arrived home after leading a voter registration drive, her son and husband told her that the landowner, for whom she sharecropped, had fired her. Often called “The Mother of Voter Registration,” Mrs. Hamer described Mississippi police menacingly following and surrounding the bus on which she and supporters rode to and from the courthouse to register African Americans to vote.
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Police threw her in jail and beat her so
badly, they damaged her kidneys. We must show that we haven’t forgotten Medgar Evers, who,
despite being a WWI veteran, “he and five friends were forced away at gunpoint from
voting in a local [Mississippi] election.” Attempts to murder the
charismatic voting rights activist included running him down in a speeding
car. June
12, 1963, a cowardly killer shot Evers in the back in his driveway. (Note: Hear an Audio
of Fannie Lou Hamer at Freedom Archives. A
documentary, This
Little Light of Mine is at aroundrobin.com. Medgar Evers
College/The City University of New York, was named after the martyred social
justice fighter.)
In the recently published Freedom Day, 1963: A Lost Interview with James Baldwin, the celebrated prolific writer described his, Jim Forman’s, and Mrs. Amelia Boynton’s (a Civil Right’s activist in Selma, AL) frightening voter registration drive experience, in 1963 in Selma, Alabama,. Three hundred and seventy-five, that’s 375, Black people stood in line - orderly and silently - on Federal courthouse property, in the presence of the Justice Department and FBI employees, while being menacingly harassed, then beaten by White troopers, police, the sheriff and a White posse. “All these people were jeopardizing their lives, their jobs, their children, everything they had in order to stand on that line in order to vote,” Baldwin said. That day, the haters won.
Yes, African Americans have a lot of skin in the voting game - figuratively and literally.
In Who Gets To Vote?, Geri Zabela
Eddins wrote: “In 1776 all white men who own property have the right to vote, except
for Catholics, Jews, and Quakers.”
Five years after the end of the Civil War, the 1870 Fifteenth Amendment opened the door for former
enslaved African American men to vote. Thomas
Mundy Peterson stepped up as the first
African American to vote in a local
election, in Perth Amboy, NJ.
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https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/6935257/thomas-mundy-peterson |
In Peterson’s sociopolitical climate, most Black men who tried to vote experienced straight up gantsta’ impediments - forced to both read and interpret the U.S. Constitution, even guess the number of jelly beans in a jar; Jim Crow “laws,” grandfather clauses, poll taxes (poor men - Black and White - couldn’t afford to pay); beatings and lynchings.
These relentless atrocities compelled Octavius V. Catto, a baseball player (Pythian team), orator and teacher, to get involved. When he “ran toward the violence,” to protect Black voters, after hearing that Whites were menacing the men who were trying to vote, in1817, in Philadelphia, he was murdered, as Daniel Biddle and Murray Dubin wrote about Catto’s life and assassination, in their book, Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America. Another man sacrificed his life in that Philadelphia violent confrontation also, when a “hatchet blow to the skull” killed him, Chris Lamb reported in his article, Fighting – and Dying – for the Vote. (Note: See also, Historical Society of Pennsylvania African American Collection, Philadelphia Pythians of 1867: Another View; The Pythian Base Ball Club: Political Activism on the Diamond, and Fighting for Equality on the Baseball Grounds.)
These relentless atrocities compelled some Black men, in Dallas, Texas, to organize the Democratic Progressive Voters League (DPVL), in 1936. In one of the oldest political African American organizations, the men were determined to ensure “the rights of African Americans around the state to vote and participate in local politics.” Three decades later, on January 23, 1964, the efforts of Black organizations and White supporters resulted in the Twenty-Fourth Amendment, which ended the poll tax, but only in federal elections. Of course, Southern and some Midwestern states continued the illegal practice.
Women were banned from voting until 1920, under the Nineteenth Amendment. For decades, Black and White suffragists* (mostly separate, and with roots in abolishing slavery) had organized, marched, lobbied and protested (some were jailed) for voting rights. Thousands of African American suffragists, including Harriett Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Forten Purvis, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Church Terrell; Native American women such as Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin of the Chippewa Nation, and Asian American women like Mabel Ping-Hau Lee, fought a double-edged sword: For the vote on one side of the razor-sharp blade and White supremacy on the other. (*Many of the women criticized the term, “suffragette” because the “ette” was considered “less than” or diminutive. They preferred “suffragists.” In a similar manner, I stand with critics that take issue with the word “slave” preferring instead the word “hostage.” Logically, anyone kidnapped and held against their will is a hostage, which I discussed in my essay, IDENTITY & LANGUAGE – Why I Don’t Call My Ancestors ‘Slaves’. Also, the word “suffrage” has nothing to do with suffering, as some people think. Linguists confirm that the word derives from the Latin word “suffragium,” meaning the right or privilege to vote.)
The acclaimed outspoken journalist against lynching, Ida
B. Wells-Barnett, who founded the Alpha Suffrage
Club in 1913, in Chicago,
mobilized thousands of
Black women to register to vote.
When the White suffragists invited Ms. Wells and Club members to walk in the 1913 parade, but, …“at the back,” Ms. Wells refused, as she conveyed in her autobiography, Crusade for Justice. Although Susan B. Anthony (the primary suffrage figure in American history classes and mass media) believed in universal suffrage, she disgracefully stated: “I would rather cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work for or demand the ballot for the negro and not the woman,’” and felt that if only one group were to be given the vote it should be White women, according to Womenshistory.org. Consequently, Native American, Asian American, Latinx and African American women were still banned from voting. Black women couldn’t vote until the U.S. Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. That’s right, African American women couldn’t vote until 1965. Just 55 years ago. (Note: Ms. Wells-Barnett’s book, Southern Horrors, can be read in full, as an e-book here. In March, 1898, Ms. Wells-Barnett and a group of Illinois congressmen personally called on “President William McKinley to urge punishment of those responsible for murdering the newly-appointed Lake City, South Carolina Postmaster Baker.” Her petition to McKinley, which states, “Statistics show that nearly 10,000 American citizens have been lynched in the past 20 years,” can be read here. Ida B. Wells Drive, in Chicago, IL, is named in her honor. Ms. Wells was award the posthumous Pulitzer Prize special citation May 4, 2020. Laura Wexler’s Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America, documents the last “recorded” murders of two Black women and two Black men, in 1946.))
Not surprisingly, women’s voting rights opponents dove into straight up gangtsta’ mode. Their fight to de-ratify the Amendment employed “cash bribes, blackmail and bear-knuckled threats,” which Elaine Weiss opined in the New York Times. When White women (and some Black women) showed up to register to vote in the fall of 1920, they were confronted with a plethora of barriers based on coveted biased state laws including, but not limited to age, citizenship, residency, mental competence, and so on. Racism was the most prevalent.
Native Americans - men and women - couldn’t vote until 1924, when Congress “granted US citizenship to the Indigenous peoples of the United States,” under the Indian Citizenship Act. Although the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution defines “citizens” as “any persons born in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction,” racist courts determined the Amendment “did not apply to Native peoples.” Considering the historical fact that Indigenous people - First Nation People - inhabited and structured a civilized life, including a solid education system, on this continent eons before Europeans invaded and committed an all-out genocidal assault on the people and stole their land, to be told they weren’t citizens, was as much an insult as an oxymoron. Despite passage of the Indian Citizenship Act, however, many states continued to deny Native Americans voting rights until 1948.
They are “attacking our voting rights with surgical precision” President Barack Obama said at Congressman John Lewis’ funeral (a statement I’m sure the gentleman warrior and the Ancestors applauded in their resting place). Incarcerating African American men and women - disproportionately - is a part of that “surgical precision” process. Enormous energy, time, and money (including our tax dollars) are flagrantly spent to block felons from voting. Consequently, in 2020, more than 6 million people cannot vote. In Kentucky, alone, “an estimated quarter of the state’s voting-age Blacks are disqualified from voting, including roughly a third of voting-age Black men.” Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow - Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness makes it cogently plain. So did Carter Glass, with regard to felon disenfranchisement at the 1901 Virginia Constitutional Convention, who yelled "Eliminate the darkie as a political factor!!!”
Since that day, Virginia has made progress. But, a provision mandating “permanent disenfranchisement” in the state’s constitution is yet to be revised. Felons in the District of Columbia (which people forget is, currently, not a state), are allowed to vote after leaving prison. Misdemeanor felons can vote from jail. Vermont’s and Maine’s felons not only can vote, but can do so while IN prison. (See a breakdown of states’ felon voting criteria here.)
When we vote, we acknowledge that we haven’t forgotten the Honorable Congressman John Lewis’s directive that we get into “good trouble; necessary trouble.” He certainly didn’t forget. Throughout his civil rights and voting rights activism, he was arrested 45 times. Social justice’s gentleman warrior was among the Freedom Riders on the Trailways bus, where after pulling into the Trailways bus station in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1961, hundreds of bloodthirsty Whites beat them bloody with iron pipes and pitchforks. Until he joined the Ancestors this year, Congressman Lewis walked among us with a special kind of dignity, bearing the scars from White state police’s savage beating that cracked his skull, on Bloody Sunday in Selma, AL, in 1965.
Without a doubt, the four centuries of unthinkable violence upon our Ancestors’ minds, bodies and spirits, and fiendish-ly diabolical straight up gangsta’ tactics - whether voting-related or not - could fill encyclopedias stacked from Earth to another galaxy and back.
So, again, if our vote didn’t count, why all the bullying; all the abhorrent, loathsome, lowdown, revolting, detestable, despicable terrorist actions?
Therefore, each election season, as I enter the voting booth (this year I walked to a neighborhood ballot box), I send a silent prayer of “Thanks” to my Ancestors and to all who endured and all who died fighting for social justice and voting rights. I bow to them with the highest reverence.
For those who choose to not vote, you not only dishonor your Ancestors who endured the wrath of hate, you give victory to the greasy, nefarious politicians and greedy, selfish businessmen and women who have destroyed and are destroying good people and the planet. YOU silence your own voice. YOU push your own mute button. YOU shut down your own power. Not a good model for our children.
Again, in 2016, one hundred million - 100,000,000 - eligible citizens did not vote. As comedian, J.B. Smoove shared on a recent televised broadcast on voting: Students in his school needed to vote on whether the class would have pizza or soup. Smoove and his schoolmates wanted pizza. But, they didn’t vote. One student did. They got soup. (It was funnier when he told it. But, you get the point.)
Voting is an act of Power and Empowerment and is also a nod of “Thanks” to murdered allies/supporters - Andrew Goodwin, Michael Schwerner, Viola Liuzzo, Heather Heyer, Anthony Huber, Joseph Robenbaum, Summer Taylor.
So, like the straight up gangsta’ voting abuses of yesteryears, 2020 is another straight up gangsta’ election. So, be there. Be fierce. Honor your/our Ancestors. Show respect. Show we haven’t forgotten. Mrs. Parks once said that, when she made the decision to refuse to give her seat to a White person, “I knew that I had the strength of my ancestors with me." When we vote, we also have the strength of our Ancestors with us. With the strength of our Ancestors, we can kick the conniving perpetrators to the curb with our straight up gangsta’ VOTE. I’ve already exercised my power with my straight up gangsta’ VOTE.
“One more thing,” as detective Columbo would say, vote in EVERY election, on EVERY level, for ALL political seats. VOTE in primaries, Gubernatorial and district; for local school board members, sheriffs, attorney generals, local commissioners, council members, mayors, aldermen/women, state senators, and so on.
Voting for candidates in these
seemingly, “lesser” positions have as much, if not more of an impact on
citizens, than the presidency. Take
Daylight Savings Time, for example, “In
the last three years, thirteen states have enacted legislation to provide for
year-round daylight saving time…” according to the National
Conference of State Legislators (NCSL), that shows a map of states where legislation
is pending, enacted or failed. In 2018,
Californians
passed their DST Proposition
7, but citizens are still waiting for it to go into effect.
So, get in “good trouble, necessary trouble,” straight up gangsta’ trouble – VOTE! And…
· Encourage everyone you know to register and vote! (Show them this essay and my poem, I STARTED NOT TO VOTE!)
· Help people that can’t get to the voting polls or mailbox.
RESOURCES
· ACLU Breaking Barriers to the Ballot Box: Felon Enfranchisement Toolkit:
· Right to Vote: A Campaign to End Felony Disfranchisement
· Election Protection hotline (Listed by state.)
· Voting Rights Battles Re-Emerge in the South - Center for Public Integrity.
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