For some, voting is more than a civic duty — it’s continuing the fight of their ancestors

Lelia G. Johnson, 65, was finished with her primary day duty by 8 a.m. She didn’t actually have to vote — she had mailed in her ballot weeks earlier. She had to take her young cousin to the polls.

“I told her to meet me on the porch at 7 a.m.,″ Johnson said referring to the time polls opened on election day. The two journeyed not only to the polling place at Murrell Dobbins Career and Technical Education High School on Lehigh Ave. in North Philadelphia. They also took a trip back through time.

For Johnson, who can’t remember missing an election since she was able to vote, exercising her franchise is as much about civic engagement as it is about honoring the voting battles of her ancestors. She wanted her cousin, whom she said was a member of the family’s 10th generation, to understand the important role voting played in their family history. How it allowed them, and many other Black families, to gain access to education and economic opportunities.

“Our family voted, although back in the day, like my great grandfather, some voted Republican because that was the only way they could get a job in the city,” said Johnson, a lifelong Democrat.

Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 which gave Black men the right to vote. Black women had to wait until 1920 with the passage of the 19th amendment.

But the Constitution didn’t protect Black voting rights as local governments fought back with with discriminatory practices including poll taxes and literacy tests as well as intimidation and violence designed to keep African Americans away from the polls.

Over a hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, in January 1965, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., started a civil disobedience campaign in Selma, Alabama to bring attention to Black disenfranchisement. State troopers attacked protestors in March that year as they attempted to cross the Pettus Bridge but the violence was captured on national television.

In the wake of public outrage over the violence, President Lyndon Baines Johnson successfully pushed and signed the Voting Rights Act that prohibited discriminatory voting practices in August, 1965. By 1969, the percentage of voting-age Black people registered to vote climbed from an estimated 23% to 61%.

“If your voice is not heard you are subject to having history repeat itself. We don’t have the luxury to sit back and not vote.”

“The importance of voting was something that was instilled in me, especially going to Howard University,” said Nakia Owens, president and CEO of the Campaign for Working Families. Owens received both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the historical Black university. “If your voice is not heard you are subject to having history repeat itself. We don’t have the luxury to sit back and not vote.”

“We need to teach children at a young age that they need to vote as if their life depends on it,” said Khalil Abdus-Salaam, 64, a retired city firefighter as he swept the front porch on North 22nd St. Abdus-Salaam had also voted by mail.

“We have been miseducated for so long,” he said referring to the seminal 1933 book, The Mis-education of the Negro, by the historian Carter G. Woodson who believed forgetting the history of accomplishments of your forebears brings with a loss of inspiration.

The most critical issues for Abdus-Salaam, who voted for Biden, are racism and environment.

And he also doesn’t want Trump to come back into office. “I knew Donald Trump’s history even before he ran for office.”

In the Trump-Biden rematch, Pennsylvania is a key battle ground state. Yet, Black voting history seems to be losing its power as a motivating force for voting, especially among young Black men.

In February Councilmember Isaiah Thomas announced an effort to register 2,024 Black men under 40 to vote in the upcoming general election. “Black voters helped determine the past few election cycles in Philadelphia,” Thomas said at the effort’s announcement. “And essentially have an impact on elections in the entire nation.”

» READ MORE: How Philly officials plan to register 2,024 young Black men to vote ahead of the November election

President Biden has called the city “the backbone of my campaign” and on election day, the Biden-Harris campaign and the Pennsylvania Democratic Party opened its first local Democratic Coordinated Campaign Office in North Philadelphia near 28 and Poplar streets, signaling the start of its general election get-out-the-vote campaign.

A list of North Philadelphia politicians including State Rep. Malcom Kenyatta, City Councilmember Jeffrey Young, Jr., State Rep. Donna Bullock, and 29th District ward leader Michelle Brownlee stressed that placing Biden’s office in North Philadelphia signaled the importance of the African American turnout for Democratic win in Pennsylvania.

“At the end of the day, elections are decided by us. They are decided by what we do when we come to these coordinated offices and they give you a list and they say go knock on all these doors and you knock on some of the doors. And then we lose the election like we did in 2016 by a couple of thousand votes,” said Kenyatta referring to Donald Trump’s Pennsylvania win by only 44,000 votes.

On Tuesday, Kenyatta won the Democratic primary for Auditor General, the state’s fiscal watchdog.

Campaign senior advisor Kellan White called the office opening, along with Biden’s recent visit to a Martin Luther King Recreation Center in North Philadelphia, an “unabashed presence in (the) neighborhood”

“This is what Kellan and the Biden-Harris team is representing here coming into our community — to give us the support we need to get the right team at the top and down ballot back to their respective places,” Brownlee said.