Under the baobab: Ready to vote? The first of 3 crucial elections is just around the corner

“There’s a time for every purpose under heaven.” — Ecclesiastes (3:1)

It is that time again. No, it’s not just the holiday, autumn or football season. It’s much more important. It’s the political season.

The general election is less than a month away. The signs are posted. The political party dinners with your choice of chicken, beef or veggies served with numerous candidate speeches have commenced. Preparations for three important, world changing, elections have begun.

First — the municipal elections for borough and town council seats, school boards, State College Borough mayor, various judges and other assorted down ballot contests will be held on Tuesday, Nov. 2. The last day to register will be Oct. 18.

Second — one of the most significant elections in years, the midterms, are next year, 2022. In Pennsylvania, the Governor, Lt. Governor, both houses of the State Legislature, both local Congressional and a Senate seat will be decided. At present, the Democratic Party controls the U.S. House by eight members (there are three vacancies) and the Senate by barely one, which includes two independents who caucus with the Dems. In Pennsylvania, the Governor is a Democrat and the Legislature is controlled by Republicans.

The third crucial election will be the 2024 Presidential election, which will also include all House seats and one Senate seat. By then we should have a good idea of the road our country is traveling.

Full disclosure, I am a lifelong member of the Democratic Party. It is genetic. I grew up in Chicago, which is soundly Democratic. The city’s last Republican mayor was Big Bill Thompson in 1927, who got elected due to the largesse and influence of Al Capone. I voted for a Republican only once in my life – John Lindsay for mayor of New York City. Some members of my ancestral family, being raised in the South, considered themselves Republicans because that was the party of Lincoln.

I consider the right to vote to be a sacred privilege. It hasn’t always been so. My ancestors were not allowed to vote in most states until after the Civil War with the passage of the 15th Amendment. Almost 200,000 soldiers of African descent, mostly formerly enslaved people, fought in that war. They had the highest casualty rate of any group.

In our time, many of my friends were killed trying to secure the right of all people to vote regardless race, gender, or age. In 1964 as a SNCC/COFO project director I went to Mississippi, my dad’s ancestral home, to register people to vote. At the time African Americans were over a third of the population yet less than 7% of those eligible were registered to vote. On the first day of the campaign, the Ku Klux Klan kidnapped and killed three of our brothers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner, a Black man and two white men.

A year later in 1965 my friend and colleague, John Lewis and Rev. Martin Luther King led a March across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama, my mother’s ancestral home, to petition for the right to vote. They were brutally assaulted by the police. During the course of that campaign Jimmie Lee Jackson, Rev. James Reeb, Viola Liuzza, and Jonathan Daniels, one Black and three white freedom fighters were murdered by white supremacists. But, it got the attention of President Johnson and America. The Voting Rights Act was passed later that year.

The right to a universal franchise is in jeopardy. Several Republican-led State Legislatures have passed laws that attempt to suppress some people’s right to vote. This repression that attempts to maintain the false edifice of white supremacy must be resisted by all good and decent folks.

It begins with us on the local level. We must register and vote. It is time.