Nonvoters Key to November Elections
Sacobserver.Com, Hazel Trice Edney, Posted: Oct 15, 2002
WASHINGTON (NNPA) - A. Peter Bailey is an Afrocentric journalist, author, lecturer, college professor and activist. He cares deeply about national and international issues - but not enough to vote. He has voted only once in the past 25 years and that was for Jesse Jackson in 1984.
A. Peter Bailey of Washington, D.C. has chosen not to vote as a conscious political act.
“Some people feel as though they have to vote. But, I feel as though if there is not a candidate that I feel as though I can support, then I don’t vote,” says Bailey. In addition to supporting Jackson, he voted for Percy Sutton, a Black civil rights lawyer and Harlem entrepreneur, in the 1977 New York City mayoral race.
At a time when affirmative action is under assault, President Bush is trying to pack the federal courts with Right-wing ideologues, and outspoken Black politicians are coming under increasing attack, to have a person as politically enlightened as Bailey adamantly refusing to vote presents a serious challenge for political organizers, who already face an uphill struggle to increase Black voter turnout.
More than 8.7 million voting-age Blacks were not registered during the 2000 presidential election. Another 2.4 million were registered but did not go to the polls. On the other hand, 12.9 million cast ballots. This means the number of Blacks who refused to register or go to the polls was almost equal to the number who voted.
Looked at another way, those numbers are even more distressing. Because more than 90 percent of African Americans usually vote for the Democratic nominee for president, had those who were registered and stayed home taken a different tact or those eligible to vote had actually registered and voted, Al Gore would be president today instead of George W. Bush.
To many organizers, that’s reason enough to vote.
However, that argument has not changed the minds of people like Bailey, who steadfastly defends his decision to stay home.
“A conscious non-vote is a political act,” says Bailey. “It is not an act of ignorance. It is not an act of apathy. It is a conscious decision that the system has not provided me with the type of people that I believe are going to make the changes that I believe are necessary in order for everything to be best done for myself, my family and my people.”
Ron Daniels, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York and chairman of the Institute of the Black World 21st Century, shares Bailey’s view that Black people would be best served by the creation of an independent Black political party. Until then, however, he does not believe that Blacks should sit it out on election day.
“It’s a bad idea,” he says. “What we really need is for Black folks to vote. What has happened is because too many Black people don’t see a relationship between their vote and any change in their lives; a lot of people have been turned off by the process. But, on the other hand, if we don’t vote, we yield the field to the other side. We yield the field particularly to the Right-wing conservative.”
The idea that some African Americans are even debating the need to vote comes as a surprise to many, considering all it took to get access to the ballot.
The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified by Congress in 1868, giving former slaves full citizenship, and the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified in 1870, guaranteeing the freedom to vote regardless of one’s race. As a result, Black political power exploded during this period.
In 1868, Blanche Kelso was elected to the U.S. Senate from Mississippi and became the first Black senator to serve a complete six-year term. In 1871, Lt. Gov. P.B.S. Pinchback served 43 days as America’s first Black governor when the White governor, Henry Warmoth, was impeached. In all, 22 Blacks were elected to Congress between 1870 and 1901.
However, a series of calculated actions - the “Plessy v. Ferguson” Supreme Court decision of 1896 upholding segregation, the Compromise of 1877 that essentially empowered the South to subordinate Blacks and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan - were signals to Southern legislatures that they could eviscerate Black political power. That also was done through legislation, the imposition of poll taxes and requiring Blacks to pass bogus literacy tests. It wasn’t long before all Black members of Congress were removed.
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