Hank Sanders called. “I went to vote, and my name was not on the voting list” where he’d been voting for 50 years. Nothing new: a Black man with a common name.
But this was State Senator Sanders, who represents Selma, Alabama. As a young man, Sanders had joined Martin Luther King on the 1965 march over the William Pettus Bridge. Four marchers were murdered en route. But, by the time the survivors entered Montgomery, the state capital, the President of the United States had introduced the Voting Rights Act.
What about Hank’s registration? It didn’t take long for our investigator Zach D. to find out that Alabama had joined Crosscheck—secretly.
I met Lynda Lowery, who told me her mom and dad took her, in 1965, to the Brown Chapel AME Church to see a minister she’d never heard of.
They introduced Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Everybody got quiet, and he was telling our parents how it was time for them to get the right to vote.
King announced he was going to the bridge and asked, “Who will walk with me?”
Maybe King didn’t get it. He had missed Bloody Sunday and the beatings; King was not in town when a pro-rights priest was murdered.
“Who will walk with me?”
At first, no one stood up. But then, Lynda and the other children rose. The parents joined.
When we got to the top of the bridge, then you could see, really see, what was on the other side. There were white people sitting on their cars with their Confederate flags and their banners, “Die, nigger,” and, “Go home, coon.”
This gas came, and with this gas, you couldn’t breathe. You couldn’t see. I ran into this big thing of tear gas, and he was running behind me with the billy club. When I woke up, they had me on a stretcher, putting me in the back of a hearse.
She was assumed dead.
Then she did something crazy.
☐ ☐ ☐
Because of all the lame jokes in my books, I’m often asked, “How do you keep your sense of humor after learning about these horrors?”
I don’t. I don’t know why America has broken my heart. I go on, not always certain why.
Who appointed me Paul Revere? The vote thieves are coming! The vote thieves are coming! But then, who appointed Paul Revere?
I was raised in the poorest barrio in Los Angeles, Pacoima-Sun Valley, where, today, next to the railroad tracks alongside the shuttered GM plant, busted-out trailers are “homes” for those left behind. I told you, this is a book about power, not voting. Taking our vote is how they disarm us.
The Theft of 2016 wasn’t your fault. You didn’t know. But, now, you do.
What can we do?
Like Paul Revere, everyone has a horse, a voice. Maybe you’ll drive some Souls to the Polls, check the registrations of ten people who mean something to you; or just insist on the quiet truth when the Twittiot in Chief bellows a fog of mendacity.
I was going through Christine Jordan’s family photo album with her the evening after she was tossed out of the polling station.
She talked with humor, but then said, sternly, emphatically, “I will vote.”
I asked if she’d be willing to put herself forward as a plaintiff in a lawsuit.
She pointed to her walker frame.
“Yes. If someone will help me up the courthouse steps.”
Will you?
☐ ☐ ☐
For me, I’m just a gumshoe, past retirement, with not much more than a flashlight to illuminate the crime scene, light up the evidence. All I have is this little light of mine.
And I’m gonna let it shine!
“Who will walk with me?
—M. L. King Jr., Selma 1965