"ON VOTING"

“ON VOTING”

            Caroline and I are in Louisville, attending an anti-white supremacy, anti-racism gathering sponsored by our Presbyterian denomination PCUSA, whose headquarters are in Louisville.  I won’t have time to write this week’s blog, but I am posting, with Susan’s permission, our daughter’s fine FaceBook post in 2014 about my mother and her commitment to voting.  I must confess here that I violated our family commitment to voting in my very first year of eligibility in 1968.  I had worked hard for Eugene McCarthy and felt like he was cheated out of the Democratic party’s nomination for President.  So, in my bitterness, I joined many other young, white people in refusing to vote for anyone so that we could protest the corruption of the system.  Does this sound familiar for 2016?  In 1968, I wrote in my friend David Billings’ name for president rather than holding my nose and voting for Hubert Humphrey.  The result was a narrow victory for Richard Nixon.  Nixon’s victory began the long, white male reaction to the civil rights movement and to the women’s movement, which has now culminated (I hope) in the election of Donald Trump.  I chastised myself greatly after that, and I have voted in every election since then.  Here is Susan’s post about my mother and the importance of voting.  As you read it, remember the power that we voters have in our hands, and please don’t be an ass like me and skip voting this fall.

            “Since we are still near Day of the Dead, here is a Voting Day story about my grandma, Mary Stroupe, who died almost exactly 10 years ago: after working for many years as a hairdresser and beautician in Helena, Arkansas, and raising my father as a single mother in the 1950s and 60s, she retired from being a practitioner to teaching at the local community college. The majority of her students were black--men and women who were working toward their beauticians' licenses. My grandma was a product of her time--raised in an entrenched and (to her) unnoticeable segregation that firmly defined which races of people were worth more than others. My father was also raised in this system, but as he came of age, his mind was transformed toward justice, and my grandma, because of her own intelligence, her devotion to my father, and a friendship with a black woman who was her peer and fellow teacher at the community college (Jessie Weston) began to change as well. Grandma was insanely stubborn: a trait which allowed her to be a single mother, and a trait which also served her students in community who would rather conserve the ways of fearful separation than become vulnerable to change. 

            On every election day, my grandma would only let in students who brought proof that they had voted before coming to class. In her early years of doing this, she had students come in saying they were being prevented from voting by election officials. The story goes that Grandma stopped class and led all of her students and her five-feet-on-a-good-day self over to the polling place, demanding of the men blocking the door that her students be let in to vote, as was their constitutional right. They relented, and her students voted.

            So I have my sticker, and I think of my grandma. I also think of my great-grandmother on my mom's side, whom I never knew, but am told that although she did not support women getting the vote in 1920, after the amendment was passed, she voted in every election until her death in 1979. We don't take enfranchisement lightly in this family.”