VOTE

It is our responsibility to be the caretakers of the community. It was during the age of reconstruction that the Black Church began to emerge as the viable entity to stand in the gap of confusion and disorientation created by the antebellum era to declare often from "bush arbors" cast your burdens on The Lord for He cares for you. We have a rich history and an established practice of survival, but we must look to God, community, and established organizations such as the NAACP to find it. We rarely sought to cower in the face of adversity ringing our hands asking, "what should we do?" We demanded Justice, equality, and freedom in intentional strategic ways. Miseducation of the Negro by Carter G. Woodson and The Spook That Sat by the Door by Sam Greenlee gave insight pertaining to antebellum and reconstruction ideologies. To move forward we must establish our own identity so no matter what others say about us we are so true to who we are that society cannot shake us. Some of societies members have replaced our slave masters and set the tone of counterculture which we have adopted as gospel. Some of us are first among the crowd to cast the first stone. To create order from disorder we must come back to the basic knowledge of who we are individually and collectively. 

The only means we can accomplish this is to tap into our inner source of power. We must return to reestablishing our value, pride, and comradery among our people first because so many of us, who were awakened by Trump’s clarion call of destruction and misogynistically oppressive antics have fallen back to sleep thinking that his time has passed. We must realize there is power in the vote. That is why others who saw the power in the vote are now seeking to destroy it. To tear down an organizational hierarchical structure we must vote. To block white supremacy, we must vote on the local and state level. Then the national level. Our norm is to vote for a president, and we wait for him to make order out of chaos. We do not turn out for the small elections such as the board of supervisors or city councils. We don't need money to vote, we simply need a mechanism to get people out to the polls. Others know that and therefore they have begun the redistricting process and are altering the identification process and making it uncomfortable for the elderly and disabled to stand in long lines to vote. It should be our organization’s goal to see that people are registered to vote, have proper credentials and a ride to the polls. 

This is how you promote change. Some of us should be working the polls. The election process is too important for us to become lulled back to sleep with a defeatist attitude. 

No president can establish change by themselves they need us to do the work on the small scale within our communities. There is power in the vote!