Fannie Lou Hamer & the Right to Vote

Fannie Lou Hamer

The mid-term elections in the US are quickly approaching.

Of course, there have been thousands of opinion pieces written about politics, decency (or the lack of it), the importance of health care (i.e. pre-existing conditions), morality (or its absence) and the like.

But as it happens, I've been struck by the simple fact that seems to over-ride all others: A large number of eligible Americans simply do not vote.

According to the US Census Bureau, only sixty-one percent of eligible voters actually filled out a ballot in the 2016 election.

A few days after the national election, the Washington Post reported that forty-three percent of eligible voters didn't bother. About 100 million people.

While political pundits have been having a field day trying to dissect how the 45th president pulled off an electoral collage upset, the fact remains the current resident of the White House and the resulting administration did it without the input of a significant chunk of America.

This is worth considering because it has consequences for all of us.

If people living in a democracy don't vote, the democracy ceases to function as one.

And the land of E pluribus Unum ("One out of many") can become an oligarchy.

Can we take another look at the 100 million individuals who didn't vote?

The US Census Bureau also reported that close to fifty-nine percent of eligible voters between 30-44 years of age cast a ballot, while only forty-six percent of those 18-29 did so.

Regardless of your political affiliation, these two generations, in particular, need to be engaged to participate in the electoral process.

Overall, it's not good for any democracy to have only sixty-one percent of its people deciding who leads them.

As Ed Kilgore, writing in New York Magazine pointed out, we may never know what exactly caused the upset in the 2016 presidential election, "[B]ut we will be living with the consequences for far longer than even the longest post mortem." 

Fannie Lou Hamer

As happenstance would have it, I've been reading a biography of Fannie Lou Hamer. She grew up in a small town in Mississippi and became a fierce proponent of civil rights. In particular voter registration in the south. Hamer paid a steep price for her advocacy. In June, 1963 she and nine of her peers who were traveling made the mistake of getting off a bus in Winona, MS, coming back from a training out of state.

The county sheriff was waiting for them and they (being black) were arrested for using the washroom and sitting down at a lunch counter. (The federal government had already struck down such segregation in public transportation stations, but this was mostly ignored in the deep South.)

It's no exaggeration to say that Fannie Lou Hamer was beaten almost to the point of death.

Hamer continued her voter registration work and was a leader in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party - an alternative set up in 1964, to challenge the Mississippi (Democratic) party that was not open to people of color being included in the delegation to their upcoming national convention.

Hamer's testimony before the Democratic National Convention's credentials committee was so powerful that it caused President Lyndon Johnson to hold an impromptu press conference in an effort to force her off the air. (You can Hamer's testimony here.)

What is remarkable about the life of Fannie Lou Hamer is that she was not the only one who put her life on the line to ensure the right to vote. The Freedom Riders in the early 1960s, and many of the early Civil Rights heroes (including Senator John Lewis, Medgar Evers, and Martin Luther King, Jr.) also paid the price for this freedom.

Like Hamer they endured beatings, threats, shootings, and even death.

In light of their sacrifices, how can we not vote on November 6th?

Photo Credit: Fannie Lou Hamer, National Women's History Museum (middle), African American Museum of Culture (bottom), Washington Post (top).