BLACK SUFFRAGE

In case you haven’t noticed, and I’m sure you haven’t,
I’ve been parading around the lower left hand corner of
Massachusetts giving talks to anyone who’ll listen about
the history of the black vote. Black Suffrage if you like.
The ancient word “suffrage” suits the topic just fine. It’s
original Middle English meaning was “intercessory prayers”
which links its later definition as the right to vote to my own
view of voting as an earnest asking of the electorate to behave
itself.

So obviously this all has to do with the junior senator from
Illinois who, incredibly, is black and actually has a shot at
becoming the President of the United States. What happened
was that I took a step backwards a few months ago and damn
near died of the wonder of it all….in this looney, erratic and
beautiful country we have found the spine to nominate a man
of color to receive our highest gift.

I’m an old guy, who has fought the good fight (not always
properly) and my head is full of angry faces and voices from
the Sixties when four hundred years of hatred got turned up like
a fresh furrow…when we despaired of winning when riots
and nationalism smeared the windshield….when it seemed that
the nation would never give African Americans a fair share of
the vote……permit them to have a persuading role in this
democracy.

What an amazing and surviving thing this Obama candidacy
is, if you put it in the same river with agonizing slavery, lynch
law, the rise of abolition and the bravery of the civil
rights movement. And add suffrage….the vote just out of the reach
of 30 million Americans whose forbears were brought here
in the holds of the slave ships.

It was time to meet the villains and honor the heroes.

So I took a look and found old Dred Scott stumbling across the border
to be denounced by Justice Taney the Supreme Court in 1857 as a
“being of an inferior order…unfit to associate with the white race.”
I found the relentless WEB DuBois, the Quakers, John Brown,
Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. I found the
Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camelia --- and the drunken
mob that murdered my friend Mickey Schwerner.

And I remembered Jim Farmer and Martin King and Malcolm X…
CORE, SCLC, SNCC and the Panthers.

So I’m going on the road. If you read this and want me to show
up at your local gymnasium and talk this talk…..I’ll be glad to
come…..my telephone number is 413 258 4010 and my Email
is trochee@aol.com I’m 77 years
old so don’t wait too long.

Val Coleman.