Dying To Vote

My Precious Babies,

Mommy voted today. I didn’t get to vote during the last Presidential election because I was with you, D’Lo, at Doernbecher’s Children’s Hospital – witnessing the fight of your life. Already an emotional wreck from watching your battle, I cried deep tears when Barack Obama was elected. I knew in that moment, glancing between the TV and your tiny sleeping body, that now when I told you that you could be ANYTHING you wanted when you grew up – even the President – I was telling you the truth. My children’s reality shifted in the span of one Tuesday in 2008.

Four years later, filling out my ballot, and I realized…this will be the last presidential election that you, Boo Boo and Mamacita, will be unable to participate in due to your age. I hope expect that you will value your right to vote. I insist that you respect the sacrifices made by others to ensure you that right. I urge you to honor them by exercizing that right. It will be sometime before you guys (D’Lo and AD) are old enough but you, Dee Dee, will have this opportunity in 2020 and I fully anticipate your understanding of the fight that won it for you.

Listen to your mama now…you are my babies. I love you. I have been and would be devastated if even your feelings were hurt. That’s how much a mommy loves her child. That’s how much the mothers of those who were killed while trying to ensure your right to vote loved them too. It was far more than the feelings of their children that were hurt…they gave their lives. Let me rephrase that – their lives were stolen. Stolen by hateful people who thought the amount of melanin in their skin, or in the skin of those they were advocating for, determined worthiness. There were many who sacrificied…

Too many…

May 7, 1955 · Belzoni, Mississippi Rev. George Lee, one of the first black people registered to vote in Humphreys County, used his pulpit and his printing press to urge others to vote. White officials offered Lee protection on the condition he end his voter registration efforts, but Lee refused and was murdered.

August 13, 1955 · Brookhaven, Mississippi Lamar Smith was shot dead on the courthouse lawn by a white man in broad daylight while dozens of people watched. The killer was never indicted because no one would admit they saw a white man shoot a black man. Smith had organized blacks to vote in a recent election.

September 25, 1961 · Liberty, Mississippi Herbert Lee, who worked with civil rights leader Bob Moses to help register black voters, was killed by a state legislator who claimed self-defense and was never arrested. Louis Allen, a black man who witnessed the murder, was later also killed.

January 31, 1964 · Liberty, Mississippi Louis Allen, who witnessed the murder of civil rights worker Herbert Lee, endured years of threats, jailings and harassment. He was making final arrangements to move north on the day he was killed.

June 21, 1964 · Philadelphia, Mississippi James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Henry Schwerner, young civil rights workers encouraging black voters, were arrested by a deputy sheriff and then released into the hands of Klansmen who had plotted their murders. They were shot, and their bodies were buried in an earthen dam.

February 26, 1965 · Marion, Alabama Jimmie Lee Jackson was beaten and shot by state troopers as he tried to protect his grandfather and mother from a trooper attack on civil rights marchers. His death led to the Selma-Montgomery march and the eventual passage of the Voting Rights Act.

March 25, 1965 · Selma Highway, Alabama Viola Gregg Liuzzo, a housewife and mother from Detroit, drove alone to Alabama to help with the Selma march after seeing televised reports of the attack at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. She was driving marchers back to Selma from Montgomery when she was shot and killed by a Klansmen in a passing car.

August 20, 1965 · Hayneville, Alabama Jonathan Myrick Daniels, an Episcopal Seminary student in Boston, had come to Alabama to help with black voter registration in Lowndes County. He was arrested at a demonstration, jailed in Hayneville and then suddenly released. Moments after his release, he was shot to death by a deputy sheriff.

January 10, 1966 · Hattiesburg, Mississippi Vernon Ferdinand Dahmer, a wealthy businessman, offered to pay poll taxes for those who couldn’t afford the fee required to vote. The night after a radio station broadcasted Dahmer’s offer, his home was firebombed. Dahmer died later from severe burns.

April 4, 1968 · Memphis, Tennessee Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist minister, was a major architect of the Civil Rights Movement. He led and inspired major non-violent desegregation campaigns, including those in Montgomery and Birmingham. He won the Nobel peace prize. He was assassinated as he prepared to lead a demonstration in Memphis.

My Precious Babies, this is just a few. Just a few of the many who suffered for you. For you, my babies…and it wasn’t that long ago. This was in your Grandmother’s time, and barely before mine. These brave souls still had entire lives ahead of them…and many would still be alive today. You will honor them by voting when the time comes, and I will honor them by making sure you know they fought and died so that you could cast a ballot like I did today.

“Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks.  Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools.  And their grandchildren are once more slaves.”  ~ D.H. Lawrence