SHIRLEY MILLER SHERROD: My husband’s heart-to-heart with black voters about runoff

Like most people, black folks in Georgia have a lot competing for their attention this holiday season. But one item on their to-do list is a must: getting to the polls to vote, by any means necessary.

With Tuesday’s runoff less than a week away, I can hear my late husband now.

Rev. Charles Sherrod, who spent his life fighting for voting rights in southwest Georgia, would caution us against getting too busy, distracted, or fatigued in this final stretch. If we do, he’d accuse us of being guilty of the very thing with which we’ve charged others: voter suppression. And of our own doing.

A hard pill to swallow, but if the shoe fits, he’d say.

He’d call our apathy and absence from the polls a kind of self-sabotage, and — yes — hypocrisy. And he would be right. We cannot accuse others of denying us this freedom, only to turn around and deny it to ourselves.

The point is, black folks can’t cry foul, point to history as proof we’ve been shut out of the process and then opt to sit out this, or any, election. Were it the early 1960s at a mass meeting, Sherrod wouldn’t hesitate to make his point plain through the lens of history.

We can’t, he’d say, salute Crispus Attucks, who in 1770 gave his life fighting against “taxation without representation” and then, not vote. We can’t point to September 1868, almost a century later, when white Georgians expelled 33 duly elected black lawmakers from the Georgia General Assembly during Reconstruction, and then not vote.

We can’t bemoan about what transpired two weeks later, when a Mitchell County sheriff and his posse gunned down more than a dozen newly freed black men, women and children attending a political rally in what became “the Camilla Massacre of 1868,” and then not vote.

We can’t protest about what happened in 1877, when Georgia created poll taxes to block our ancestors from voting, and then not vote. We can’t sound off about how Georgia imposed literacy tests in 1907, aimed at tripping us up and shutting us out, and then not vote.

We can’t speak to 1917, when Georgia adopted a vote-counting system calculated to empower rural white voters and dilute the voting muscle of black voters concentrated in Georgia cities, and then not vote.

We can’t complain about Georgia being one of only two states in the country that, to this day, forces candidates into a runoff during a general election if they don’t earn more than 50% of the vote, and then not vote.

And we can’t bad-mouth Georgia’s latest voter suppression law that attacks absentee voting and criminalizes people giving a drink of water to someone at the polls, and then not vote.

The bottom line is, if you’re still straddling the fence about giving up the time and standing in line to cast your ballot, let Sherrod’s thoughts above and the adages below serve as reminders of why us voting matters:

♦ Remember, people fought and died to get us to this moment in history.

♦ Remember, the tree of liberty must be watered by the blood of each generation, including ours.

♦ Remember, 80% of success is about showing up.

♦ Remember, we are indeed the ones we’ve been waiting for.

♦ And remember, our children are watching.

Let’s get to the polls like our life depends on it. Because it does.

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