the right to vote

I can't stop thinking about my neighbor.  She's an 83 year old African-American wonder who spent many hours this fall going to  high schools in order to help 18 year olds register to vote.  Then, on Election Day, she spent the day at local hospitals giving voting access to people who had been hospitalized within 48 hours of November 8.

I was marveling at her commitment the other day, and I decided to go back and look at a bit of history. In Divided by Faith, I read about the Reconstruction Period 1865-1877.  Four millions former slaves were now "freed" but owned no land and were living without much for resources or educational experience.  Many white folks were angry with the abolishment of slavery, and a new type of oppression emerged- sharecropping.  Still, with that all of that being true, this was happening:

"Blacks and whites were seen going to school together, and even in politics together.  As northern reporter James S. Pike reported on his visit to the South Carolina House of Representatives: 'The Speaker is black, the clerk is black, the doorkeepers are black, the little pages are black, the chairman of the Ways and Means is black, and the chaplain is coal black.'  This was a shock to white southerners, and northerners too.  After hundreds of years of white domination, suddenly, within just a few short years, former slaves were holding seats of power.

In addition to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, African Americans in the South were able to capitalize on their numbers.  According to the 1860 census, African Americans constituted 35 percent of Virginia's population, 36 percent of North Carolina's, 44 percent of Georgia's, 45 percent of Florida's and Alabama's, 50 percent of Louisiana's, 55 percent of Mississippi's, and 59 percent of South Carolina's.  Assuming voting along racial lines, those proportions made winning elections not only possible, but likely.

All this was too threatening for most white southerners, and for many white northerners as well. They feared for their way of life, their sense of group position, and their vision of a Christian America, which, as the leading evangelical social reformer of the time, northerner Josiah Strong, clearly expressed, was to be an Anglo-Saxon society.  The former slaves were not properly Christianized nor educated to be holding elected offices and running the nation.  More directly, the economic and cultural threat of the African Americans was very real, and southerners responded by instituting the increasingly harsh realities of the now well-known Jim Crow laws, designed to separate blacks from whites and subjugate blacks in social and economic life."

I spent some time the other night trying to answer questions to a sample literacy test found here that was used to turn away African Americans from their right to vote during the Jim Crow era.  I, of course, failed big time.  And, I considered deeply how the Voting Rights Act wasn't signed until the year I was born, 1965.  Crazy.  Unjust.  Not okay.  

This to say, that I've been impacted this year in a way I had not been before regarding the privilege and right to vote and the struggle for so many in what I have previously taken for granted.  I so appreciate my neighbor's commitment and what she's shown me this year through her tireless work to honor those who have struggled before her and to use her voice to help others use their voice.  She makes me want to fight the good fight alongside her.   Thank you, W.M.W.  Your faith in Jesus, your life, and your commitment to justice work makes our community a better place.