A voter outside an polling place. Facebook Twitter WhatsApp SMS Email Print Copy article link Save I need little encouragement to sprint to the voting booth in local and national elections. Just give me the time and place and I’ll be there ASAP.
Traffic and long lines mean nothing to me. As the old folk would say: “If it’s for dogcatcher, I’m voting.” Sometimes I participate in early voting .
I did that earlier this week and was overjoyed to see a friend from my college days a few steps behind me. Other times I vote on Election Day. I support voting by mail, but I don’t do it because I’m “ol’ skool.
” I like to see everything in front of me when I cast my vote, and I like the machine essentially telling me my vote has been counted. Yeah, laugh if you want, but I’ve been doing this for 52 consecutive years. But I don’t laugh when I read or hear stories of Black people refusing to vote.
How can that be, I ask myself? Bear with me because I have written this before, and I need to write it again. Ed Pratt I am inspired to vote by the heartbreaking vision of the time when Black people were being shot, beaten, burned and hanged for voting or encouraging other Blacks to vote. Those days were in my lifetime.
Here’s what I mean. I recently saw this old news snippet, quoted in a social media post: “George W. Lee, 51, Negro, shot to death May 7, 1955, at Bezoni (Belzoni), Humphreys County, Miss.
, after he refused to withdraw his name from voting list: Lamar D..
