Tag: vote

Of white blouses, bread and ballots

Greetings, fellow humans! This message will also be posted on the website of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Castine (Maine) in due course, but without gaseous history-wonk effusions and additional snarky commentary. Lucky you! By the time you see this it may be August 18, which is the actual hundred year anniversary of the 19th amendment being ratified. Wondering why the heck that should still matter to you when you’ve got cats to feed and bills to pay (and bills to pay due to feeding the cats)? Keep reading.

When we think about the white dresses and festive banners of suffrage, we know how the story turns out. So far, at least. We may tend to skip ahead toward the end. “Those ladies” went out and held some parades, fundraisers and meetings. Some of them went to jail. We’ve no doubt heard a few of them refused to eat when they were incarcerated.

That sounds rough, we may think. But they won in the end (or in 1920 in the US). Well, white women won. Native American women and many immigrant women remained disenfranchised. Native people got the vote in 1925, but states would use little loopholes and technicalities (and overt violence) to keep them from the polls. We’re familiar with hearing this type of experience for African Americans. Even after women allegedly got the franchise in 1920, black women and men risked their lives and those of their families if they tried to exercise their rights to vote. We’ll talk more about that momentarily.

The pageantry possible when the women organizing it are badasses at sewing!

Skipping ahead through the lessons of history is understandable in our world of blazing-speed and multi-tasking, where we are not only tempted but encouraged to drop any habits or curiosities that do not clearly serve our immediate ends. Yet, as Congressman John Lewis recently reminded us in his powerful memorial op-ed in the New York Times, those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. When it comes to disenfranchisement and voter suppression, this may never have been truer than it is in the fall of 2020. As he said:

You must also study and learn the lessons of history because humanity has been involved in this soul-wrenching, existential struggle for a very long time. People on every continent have stood in your shoes, through decades and centuries before you. The truth does not change, and that is why the answers worked out long ago can help you find solutions to the challenges of our time.

When Woodrow Wilson was elected to office in 1913, women and other minorities who were inclined to activism were ready to hit the street. This president was known to be a racist. He supported and helped to disseminate overtly racist propaganda, like the white nationalist film “Birth of a Nation,” which was based on a novel called, “The Clansman.” Among other things, this film passed on the old tropes that black men would sexually assault white women if they were not rigorously controlled by morally superior (civically franchised) white males. Wilson screened this film at the White House. It was, in fact, the first film ever screened at the White House. One example of a president taking advantage of a new and exciting technology to endorse certain opinions more personal than civic.

Some NOT very fine people having a KKK style celebration of the first film ever screened in the White House by President Woodrow Wilson

Women engaged in activism for their own franchise at that time. Then called suffragettes, hundreds held a protest parade against Wilson in March of 1913. It was held the day before his inauguration and widely compared to the 2016 women’s marches. In 1913, the women on the march were assaulted in the streets to the extent that over a hundred of them had to be hospitalized. The secretary of defense had to deploy federal troops to help quell the violence that rose up against them and allow ambulances to get through the violent crowds to even help them. Later and after a congressional hearing on the matter, the police commissioner of Washington DC was forced out over his decisions not to send sufficient police support for the women’s march.

crowds pressing in on the parade, 1913, stopping the lead float from progressing

When women were jailed for protests back at that time, it was not a low impact experience. Lady Constance Bulwer Lytton recorded in her memoirs what it was like to come up against hostile police. On her first march to Parliament, this was her experience:

The crowd pushed me up against a policeman and I said to him, “I know you are only doing your duty and I am doing mine.” His only answer was to seize me with both his hands round the ribs, squeeze the remaining breath out of my body and, lifting me completely into the air, throw me with all his strength. Thanks to the crowd I did not reach the ground; several of my companions in more isolated parts of the square were thrown repeatedly onto the pavement…. A German lady who was tall, well-built and of considerable strength managed to keep near me. Three times, after each of the “throws,” she came to my hep and warded off the crowd while I leant up against some railings, or against her shoulder to recover my breath. Several times I said to her, “I can’t go on; I simply can’t go on.” She answered, “Wait for a little, you will be all right presently.” At the time and ever since I have felt most inexpressibly grateful to this stranger-friend.

Lady Constance and pal (I’ve noted before that Constance was a dedicated vegetarian also)

This type of treatment was recorded by many women on both sides of the pond. Of course, once Constance and her peers made it to the parliament, many were arrested and incarcerated. The treatment didn’t get any better there. Two of the most notorious prisons where these women activists ended up were the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia, U.S. and the Holloway Women’s Prison in London, U.K. (where Constance wound up many times). Once in jail they were deliberately (not surprisingly) treated with optimal lack of dignity. At the worst prisons some were stripped, chained naked to cell doors, and sometimes sexually assaulted. This happened in November of 1917 at Occoquan in VA with such brutality that historians still term it a “night of terror,” with women being stripped and chained to the cells, and one being beaten to the point of a heart attack.

They didn’t do their activism, as the media at the time tried to portray, because they were narcissistic attention-seekers or bored housewives who’d been “allowed” too much time on their hands. They did it because they knew they, their children and grandchildren would never have full rights to safety and freedom (or at least a chance at them) without the massive privileges that came with a ballot.

one of the ambulances at the 1913 parade, completely unable to move until Feds sent the literal cavalry to help

This is not to say that our activist ancestors always got things right. At the same 1913 march where the police let Wilson supporters in town for the inauguration wreak havoc on the women activists, internal strife was doing damage of its own. Black women activists from groups like the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) were being turned away from the march by white organizers. The NACW was formed in 1896 to advocate for the franchise as a way that black women and men could work against inequalities of all kinds (especially lynching, which was rampant at the time the group was founded and was more of a threat than ever with Wilson screening that horrible film and endorsing the clan). The women’s club motto was “lifting as we climb,” and they sought the women’s vote to improve the lives of women as well as men in their communities.

Due to pressures put to bear by white women from the segregated south, the women’s march organizers colluded with oppression. Now a’days we call that “horizontal hostility,” where minorities put in the position of scrapping for crumbs end up in conflict with each other rather than the ones pulling the strings. Anyway, noted African American suffragist Ida B Wells did manage to march with the white delegation from Illinois as a form of protest, but she was the exception that proved the rule. Similar things were happening in the UK as British women tried to sell ladies from Australia, India, and other “colonies” on sitting in the back seat and waiting for a turn.

NACW CLUB OF BUFFALO, NEW YORK, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.

None of these women’s activism was not easy or safe. Mostly, as the activists pointed out, because women couldn’t vote. Without full citizenship, they lacked basic protections. They pointed out what we all too often forget in this day and age, where voting is so much of a privilege that it has become little more than a hassle. They pointed out that those with the franchise make all social decisions about rights and burdens around issues of healthcare, child care, education, abuse, indigency, reproductive choices (or lack thereof), and literal freedom (whether people may be enslaved or held in poor house prisons, or made to work off debts as indentured servants, for example). The first time any women were registered to vote in Massachusetts, for example, was in order to vote on school board committees. After several failed attempts they won this limited franchise in 1879. At this same time in the American South, openly violent white nationalist groups like the KKK and “red shirts” were terrorizing black citizens who dared to take advantage of the waning opportunities that came after the Civil War.

Particularly, white southerners used violence and intimidation to keep black citizens away from voter registration and the polls. It was official in 1896 when the Supreme Court decision Plessy vs. Ferguson gave Southern states room to modify their constitutions and create fully legal segregation. Hence came the era of Jim Crow, with stunts like “guess the number of jellybeans in this jar” in order to register to vote (but only if you’re African American). Activists like young John Lewis were beaten and humiliated for their peaceful sit-ins and marches, culminating in the infamous “Bloody Sunday” where police gassed and beat Lewis and other participants in a march across the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama. Particularly infamous was the beating of female activist Amelia Boynton, due to the abject brutality the police unleashed on her. Reminiscent of the personal accounts of Lady Lytton, Amelia later recounted her experiences on Bloody Sunday:

Then they charged. They came from the right. They came from the left. One [of the troopers] shouted: ‘Run!’ I thought, ‘Why should I be running?’ Then an officer on horseback hit me across the back of the shoulders and, for a second time, on the back of the neck. I lost consciousness.

Amelia Boynton about Bloody Sunday in Selma, 1965
Lewis and Boynton holding President Obama’s hands at the 2013 Pettus Bridge commemoration (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson) This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.

Lewis, Boynton, and their brave peers won a major victory in 1965 with the Voting Rights Act. This outlawed discriminatory voting practices like those of the Jim Crow south. Unfortunately, in 2013, the teeth were pulled out of this law. A key formula in the language was removed by a slight Supreme Court majority (5 to 4) that meant states no longer need to seek federal permission to tinker with their voting anti-discrimination laws (a guardrail known as “preclearance”). As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg warned in her typically accurate and acerbic dissent,

“Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”  

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg 2013

Okay, she’s awesome.

Ever since activists around universal franchise (making sure everyone can vote with equal ease of access) have warned us that states have been up to mischief. Purging the voter rolls of people who haven’t voted recently, moving polling places without notifying citizens, throwing out ballots due to many subtle technicalities, and so on have snowballed over the past seven years. One of the high-profile activists fighting for universal franchise in the news of recent months has been Stacy Abrams. Abrams ran to be Governor of Georgia in 2018. She lost to her opponent, Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who happened to be the one setting a lot of rules about voter accessibility and the validity of ballots. Accusations of corruption by Kemp were rife, and not for the first time in his career. Yet whether we agree with those allegations or not, Stacy Abrams’ campaign had a wonderful speech in it that can be applied to the importance of the universal franchise. This speech wasn’t done by Kemp herself. It was done by Oprah!

Oprah harkened back to the times experienced by young John Lewis (and generations of both their ancestors before), when she urged us all to the polls. At a televised “town hall” event in November 2018, she said:

I didn`t take voters voting seriously until around my mid-twenties. Around my mid-twenties, I had the privilege of hearing Reverend Otis Moss Jr. who`s a preacher. You all know him, preacher, preacher in Cleveland, Ohio. And I heard him tell the story of his father, of Otis Moss Sr. who right here in Georgia`s True County got up in the morning and put on his only suit and his best tie and he walked six miles to the voting poll location he was told to go to in LaGrange. And when he got there after walking six miles in his good suit and tie, they said boy, you`re at the wrong place. You need to go over to Mountville. So he walked another six miles to Mountville. And when he got there they said, boy you`re at the wrong place. You need to go to the Rosemont School. And I picture him walking from dawn to dusk in his suit, his feet tired getting to the Rosemont School and they say boy you`re too late. The polls are closed, and he never had a chance to vote. By the time the next election came around, he had died. So when I go to the polls and I cast my ballot, I cast it for a man I never knew. I cast it for Otis Moss Sr. who walked 18 miles one day just for the chance to vote. And when I go into the polls, I cast the vote for my grandmother Hattie Mae Lee who died in 1963 before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and never had a chance to vote. I vote for her. And when I stand in the polls, I do what Maya Angelou says I come as one, but I stand as 10,000, all those who paved the way that we might have the right to vote. And for anybody here who has an ancestor who didn`t have the right to vote and you are choosing not to vote wherever you are in this state in this country, you are dishonoring your family. We are disrespecting and disregarding their legacy, their suffering, and their dreams when you don`t vote. So honor your legacy. Honor your right to citizenship in this which is the greatest country in the world, the greatest country in the world. And the right to vote is like the crown we all get to wear.

I would lovingly urge all of us to honor an ancestor when we take the time and make the effort to make sure we cast a ballot. Base line, all of us who have female ancestors, and I think that’s pretty common, have such ones to honor. Many never saw their own chance, but they endured great suffering and hardship to win that chance for us. They knew what we have all too often forgotten.

A ballot is bread. A ballot is a roof over your head. A ballot is laws to protect you when the police are called, either by you or on you. A ballot is an education for your children and grandchildren (an education equal to those with greater opportunity). A ballot is dignified care for our elders and for yourself in times of illness, disability, and later years. A ballot is your freedom of speech, and freedom of reproductive choice. The rights that our forebears fought for so hard are not cast in iron and impervious to harm. As the Voter Rights Act shows, they can be eroded in a heartbeat and eventually perhaps destroyed completely.

A ballot cast by you is also all of those things cast by you on behalf of your friends and neighbors. Those who fought for the ballot knew all too well what it is worth. Would they ever have dreamed how quickly many of us forgot? What else can we do? Even if we don’t have the time or proclivity toward “activism,” there are things. Now is the time to urge friends and neighbors to apply for absentee ballots. Simple letting your own community know you plan to vote and talking about the positive reasons for this civic decision, makes an impact. If you go to the ballot in person, perhaps take one person in your circle who needs a ride.

Those who fought for the vote knew its value and wouldn’t want us to forget. I’ll let one of them say that in her own words. This is from Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association from 1900-1904 and 1915-1920.

“The vote is the emblem of your equality, women of America, the guarantee of your liberty. That vote of yours has cost millions of dollars and the lives of thousands of women. Money to carry on this work has been given usually as a sacrifice, and thousands of women have gone without things they wanted and could have had in order that they might help get the vote for you. Women have suffered agony of soul which you can never comprehend, that you and your daughters might inherit political freedom. That vote has been costly. Prize it! The vote is a power, a weapon of offense and defense, a prayer. Understand what it means and what it can do for your country. Use it intelligently, conscientiously, prayerfully.”

Carrie Chapman Catt

Non-partisan voting resources:

League of Women Voters: https://www.lwvme.org/

When we all vote: https://www.whenweallvote.org/