With my hand on the pearls she gave me as graduation gift, I said a prayer, shed a tear and said her name: “Granny, this vote is for you.”
Ms Rose won’t be here to see the returns come in later today, whatever the outcome might eventually be. Like many of the Black and indigenous women whose blood, sweat, and tears form the foundations of this country, she didn’t live to experience the full promise of this great experiment known as America.
Granny died two weeks before election day.
For nearly half her 98 years, Ms Rose was ineligible to vote – subject to a society that deemed women who looked like her worthy of being silenced. Even after the 19th amendment gave white women the right to vote, Black women remained disenfranchised.
Neither the 19th nor the 15th amendment, which granted Black men their rights a century prior, addressed voter suppression in the form of Jim Crow laws that perpetuated segregation, legalized discrimination and barred Black communities from voting through poll taxes and literacy tests, or just plain threats of violence.
Born in 1922 – two years after women’s suffrage – she entered a world in which Black women were “pulled in two directions”: fighting alongside Black men for racial equality and White counterparts for women’s rights, all while relegated as inferior and excluded within both movements.
But in 1967, Granny put herself and her family on a journey, escaping the violence of Jim Crow and patriarchy in Arkansas to forge a new life in Wisconsin, a journey taken by hundreds of thousands of Black Americans who fled discrimination in the south during the Great Migration for better opportunity of the north.
For Black journalists, our commitments to tell these stories would not be possible without the sacrifice of women like her.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
