Under the baobab: Today is your last chance to register to vote in a crucial PA election
I spent the summer of 1964 working in the Mississippi Freedom Project. We had to get out of bed by 4 a.m. so we could make it out to the cotton fields. We were trying to persuade the field workers to come to the voter registration offices and to sign our petitions for the Freedom Democratic Party.
They started working in the fields at sunrise. We were not allowed to trespass on or near the fields. It was dangerous to the field workers. They were under constant threat of violence. They could be beaten or worse. Many lost their jobs and their lives. Fannie Lou Hamer lost one and almost lost the other. It was important work. In white supremacist dominated segregated America less than 7% of the eligible African American voters in Mississippi were registered as compared to over 70% of the whites.
It was dangerous for us registration workers as well. We were trying to enforce people’s rights under the 14th and 15th Amendment. There were about 700 college volunteers, mostly white and 200-300 SNCC and CORE workers, mostly African American. During that summer, three of our brothers were killed and several folks were critically wounded. According to the press, 80 of us were beaten, 1,000 were arrested. There were 35 shooting incidents, 37 churches bombed or burned and 30 Black businesses or homes were burned.
My second-floor freedom school office had the windows shot out. I was arrested twice. But we kept our hands on the plow and stayed the course. We risked our lives so that all Americans would have the right to vote. The Selma March and the passage of the Voting Rights Act was still a year away.
It was a crucial time in history. Freedom, justice and equality for all Americans was at stake. White supremacist fascists fought to hold power in the South and to expand it throughout the land. With the rise of racist governors like Ross Barnett of Mississippi, Lester Maddox of Georgia and George Wallace of Alabama, they had a good chance of doing it. In 1968 Wallace ran for president on a platform constructed on racial segregation and white supremacy. He defeated Nixon and Humphrey in five states and came within 50,000 votes in two others. Fortunately, the racists did not win the election or the moment.
Most of the voter registration warriors who fought in that struggle have joined the ancestors. It remains for the rest of us to pick up their batons. Today we are engaged in a struggle for the soul of democracy which is as endangered as racial equality was 58 years ago. The very fabric of democracy is at stake — control of the House and Senate, the Governorship of Pennsylvania, Georgia and dozens of other states, abortion rights, voting rights, global warming, income and wealth distribution, infrastructure and services development, corruption of the electoral process.
Oct. 24 is the last day to register to vote in the Nov. 8 election. I recently spent nearly a month in Georgia, another crucial battleground state. They held a major get-out-the-vote campaign. Georgia began early voting this past week. In three days almost 300,000 voters had exercised their right despite some draconian repressive regulations. This is twice as many people who voted in 2018, the last midterm. Even more significant, it is a 3% higher turnout than 2020, the last presidential election. Our fellow citizens in the Peachtree State clearly understand how crucial this election is. It remains to be seen if we share their consciousness.
We risked our lives when we tried to register people to vote in Mississippi. The stakes are higher this time. What will be at risk this November is the future of democracy. The freedom struggle continues.