I marked my first ballot in 1971, as a white college student pollwatcher for the Charles Evers gubernatorial campaign in Mississippi.
I was helping illiterate black voters, many of them over sixty, who were voting for the first time in their lives. It took a lot of courage for them to vote in Scott County, Mississippi, even in 1971. They had to walk through a gauntlet of hostile white men to get into and out of the polling places.
At a rural polling place in Lake, as votes were being counted, a group of white men walked in carrying nooses which were clearly intended for me and another pollwatcher. We managed to get out unharmed but not before black voters contacted Evers headquarters to report the noose sighting. Evers cancelled a press conference to call for a black self-defense team to get to the polling place to rescue us and an elderly black minister who was serving as bailiff. This was all after the sheriff, re-elected in a landslide that night, came by, saw we were in danger, and told us we had it coming for interfering in Mississippi politics. When I explained that we were protected by Mississippi state law, he responded (and this is not fiction): "Boy, this is Scott County, Mississippi, and in Scott County, I am the law."
Thirty-seven years later we are about to elect a black man as president. He may not carry Mississippi, but I can guarantee that there are a lot of folks voting there today who have smiles on their faces that will be there all day--and they won't have to hide those smiles because they don't have to be afraid to vote and can be clear about how they're voting.
The struggle for voting rights has lasted as long as we have been a nation. The progression from an oligarchy of white male property owners to today's electorate has been a costly struggle that involved the unimaginable suffering of the Civil War--and Reconstruction, the sadistic deprivations of poll taxes and "literacy" tests, the battle for women's suffrage, the "old enough to die but not to vote" hypocrisy of the Vietnam era, and the current battle against the many forms of voter suppression arrayed against racial minorities and the poor.
It was hard to see the value of all that struggle when racists were elected and re-elected in the South-by popular vote, when Nixon and Reagan won landslide victories, and when we saw elections stolen, as in 2000, and perhaps in 2004.
But today? Today I feel like I'm living a dream that has finally come true. And today, WE are the deciders and, despite suppression efforts and indefensible waiting lines and "problems," our vote is the law.
With an Obama presidency we have the opportunity to fix the problems plaguing U.S. elections, defeat suppression efforts, and make it easier for every citizen's vote to be counted. I hope it will be an important agenda item for his administration. That is a struggle we should all be happy to continue.