Please Vote
(And vote early if you can!)
In April of 1992, protests erupted in Los Angeles as a response to the acquittal of the four police officers who brutally beat Rodney King. I was on my way to work when I heard the news from LA. New York was still quiet—but tense. I worked at a theater and we went ahead with our programming despite store closures along 14th Street. An American Studies major, I thought maybe we were on the verge of cultural revolution, the kind I’d studied, the kind that made things ultimately more equitable. (We all know how that went.)
Later that night, I heard that my amazing friend Rebecca Walker (her incredible book Women Talk Money appears in Ramona) made a pronouncement: “We have to do something,” she said. And when Rebecca decides to take action, she is unstoppable. A month shy of graduating Yale, Rebecca, along with Shannon Liss Riordan, founded a nonprofit, The Third Wave, with the goal of mobilizing young women. I wanted to be a part of it.
Third Wave organizers identified voter registration as an important first campaign for a variety for reasons, not the least of which was connected to the original Freedom Summer in Mississippi, 1964. I worked in the office for a few months helping organize the drive by calling local community groups and grassroots GOTV endeavors in each community we wanted to visit.
We traveled in a caravan of buses emblazoned with the words VOTE EQUALS POWER. We were sponsored by the Ms. Foundation for Women and Esprit (who donated t-shirts!). We were 120 young people in three buses driving across the US and back in twenty-three days registering voters in twenty-one underserved communities. We targeted lower income areas, housing projects, community centers, and women’s groups, engaging in everything from door-to-door canvassing to tables at community events like Philadelphia’s Black Family Reunion and the Berkeley Flea Market, to Sunday services at Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco. If there were potential voters gathering, we wanted to be there.
I was 22. I kept a journal. I made friends. I had a crush or two. We slept in YWCAs, sometimes in beds, sometimes in sleeping bags. We worked hard. We met new people. Most valuably, I had the opportunity to talk to strangers: in places like Philly, St. Louis, Oakland, South Central LA, Houston, Atlanta, Winston-Salem and Birmingham. I learned firsthand about the United States of America and what ails her (or at least, what ailed her in 1992).
Three decades later, I’m incredibly proud of that voter registration drive, but I’m shocked at the ways in which these questions and issues have resurfaced—many would say they’ve never gone away. Now that I’m a mother, I feel even more strongly about voting and exercising the hard-won right to do it. As a woman, I’m furious about the loss of reproductive freedoms. As a mother, I’m terrified by climate change. As a Jew, I’m equally terrified of Christian nationalism.
Please get to the polls. Now is the time. Please make a plan to vote. Vote early if you can (I’m going to get in line today!) and show up. It matters. Your vote matters.
More on Ramona at Midlife and the joys of collaboration later this week.
Love,
Brooke