Saturday, October 1, 2016

BLACK PEOPLE DIED SO I COULD VOTE

It’s hard not to go to the polls when a generation of African-Americans risked—and sometimes lost—their lives to get you there





When we were growing up in South Los Angeles, my siblings and I often heard my dad’s impromptu sermons about matters of importance: the value of education, the perils of purchasing on credit, the virtue of hard work, and the dire necessity of voting.

“People died so we could vote,” he’d say.


As a very young kid, I imagined the dying as a scene from a Western movie: good guys vs. bad guys and bodies strewn across a grassy battlefield. In the end the good guys walked away, alive and free to vote. My imaginary battle scene was historically inaccurate, but I came to learn the element of peril was real. And we weren’t talking about faraway countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, but the U.S.A., in the not very distant past.

http://time.com/3423102/people-died-so-i-could-vote/








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