I have lived this history. I have seen what can happen. You just do your part and vote. Make sure you encourage your family and friends to do the same. This is a local election. The electoral college holds no sway. So, if Hillary or whoever runs for senate, congress or dog catcher, the winner this time is the one with the most votes.
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You’re emotions seem to be clouding your ability to think logically. The question now before you is simple: Enumerate the benefits of blacks voting which yields tangible benefits for ordinary black people like me and my neighbors? Simply responding saying “vote because…” is not a benefit (no matter how many times you repeat it) but demonstrates you lack a single benefit for black voting which, by default, proves my contention that blacks voting appears to be nonsensical.
I’m about to divest you of your
only crutch you possess in perpetuating this Santa Claus-related process.
May I draw your attention to Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Give us the Ballot” speech dated May 17, 1957. As he gives a background of why blacks should be able to vote, he goes on to list a number of things why blacks' votes should be meaningful.
Here's some of that list. He says:
1-Give us the ballot and we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights.
2-Give us the ballot and we will no longer plead to the federal government for passage of an anti-lynching law; we will by the power of our vote write the law on the statute books of the southern states and bring an end to the dastardly acts of the hooded perpetrators of violence.
3-Give us the ballot and we will transform the salient misdeeds of blood-thirsty mobs into calculated good deeds of orderly citizens.
4-Give us the ballot and we will fill our legislative halls with men of good will, and send to the sacred halls of Congressmen who will not sign a Southern Manifesto, because of their devotion to the manifesto of justice.
5-Give us the ballot and we will place judges on the benches of the South who will "do justly and love mercy," and we will place at the head of the southern states governors who have felt not only the tang of the human, but the glow of the divine.
I bet you don’t wanna go over each one in detail and attempt to reconcile the list with black voting and results, do you? Assuming you will avoid doing that, I’m needing you instead to understand what Dr. King is articulating there because we have those who carelessly use ridiculous excuses parallel to your own hiding behind King’s good name to justify the continual utility of failed strategies from the 60s and thereby keep good meaning black voters running in place not going anywhere.
Dr. King is saying give us the vote so that we
can vote and when we can vote, we’ll do what? We’ll get something in return. No where do you see him saying in his list to “vote just because.”
Dr. King or no one else during those great times of the 60s ever stated that black people should continue to vote even after decade after decade it has proven to yield ordinary black people zero results.
Black people in denial of their voting impotence have artistically mischaracterized the purpose of the black vote.
In other words, voting is meant to be meaningful and positive, result-driven and not for “optics.”
“It is unfortunate,” said Dr. Carter G. Woodson back in 1933, “…that such a large number of Negroes do not know any better than to stake their whole fortune on politics. History does not show that any race, especially a minority group, has ever solved an important problem by relying altogether on one thing, certainly not by parking its political strength on one side of the fence because of empty promises.” [
The Mis-Education of the Negro, page 94].