Black woman from Mississippi didn’t feel safe voting until she moved to SLO
The right to vote is what makes government responsive to the will of the people.
If government fails, we suffer with broken systems.
Failures related to racial justice, health care and an electrical grid are just a few recent examples.
How can democracy get stronger when lines at the polls can be so long that citizens require water to survive voting?
Chaos peddlers on social media have tried to cast doubt on the election process.
In January, a mob supporting President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., as members of Congress were in the process of certifying the Electoral College results following the 2020 presidential election. Five people died that day, including a Capitol police officer.
According to a USA Today story, Trump tweeted the word “rigged” 157 times since taking the oath of office in 2017, with the frequency increasing exponentially as votes were counted for the 2020 election.
Actual cases of fraud are far fewer.
The conservative Heritage Foundation listed 16 cases of fraud in the United States in 2020.
The Trump campaign lost 61 election lawsuits, winning only one.
The frantic rush to change election law is a transparent effort to fix a non-existent problem and to deny access to voters who have long been targeted by bigots.
There are examples of this pathetic practice in stories from the earliest days of The Tribune, which was founded shortly after the Civil War.
Bill King wrote this story, originally published in Feb. 11, 1965, about a Black woman registering to vote in San Luis Obispo after enduring decades of racial discrimination in Mississippi. The story was previously republished online in 2009.
Fears lifted, Negro woman registers
The right to vote, a common place thing to most Americans and ignored by many has become a reality for a 54-year-old Negro woman living in San Luis Obispo.
Wednesday, Dora Baines walked into the county courthouse and into the clerk’s office to register to vote. No one was standing in the doorway blocking her entrance.
There were no shouts of protests or name-calling.
There were no lines of jeering whites along the walk, held back by helmeted policemen. It was quiet — a normal afternoon at the clerk’s office. Mrs. Baines simply walked in, announced her intentions, signed an affidavit and walked out. It took less than five minutes.
This simple, short ceremony was a remarkable thing to Mrs. Baines, who has been denied the right to vote for more than 35 years in Mississippi under threat of reprisal.
She was openly amazed at the simplicity of registering — no tests to take, no difficult questions to answer and, most of all, with no fear of having her house burned or suffering bodily harm.
For 53 years, Mrs. Baines lived in Mississippi, in a small town near Natchez, in the deep, deep South, she said. “A poor area.”
She was married when she was 15 and three years later took her first job.
“I cleaned a 60-80 room hotel for $5 a week,” she recalled. “Most people back there never had much,” she said. “Even most of the white folks were poor.”
Her life was routine for the next 35 years as she raised a son and went about her daily cleaning chores. She managed to buy a little home in Roxie, Mississippi. She has never driven or had a car.
Then things started changing. Racial strife was spreading as Negros began demanding their rights and started voter registration drives. People were killed and the Ku Klux Klan burned homes, she said.
“I never tried to vote or register. I was afraid of trouble.”
With the situation in Mississippi growing more dangerous, she decided to leave about a year ago when she heard that her brother was dying of leukemia in Compton, where her son was living. She moved to Compton, bringing her invalid mother with her.
Her brother died last May and the following September she decided to move to San Luis Obispo and work. Since then she has been doing domestic housework when she can find it while still caring for invalid mother.
“I make $1.50 an hour here,” she said proudly, “and people here are as sweet as they can be.”
Registering to vote was a big moment in her life and the same may soon be possible for her mother, Rose, who is 81 and has never registered or voted.
