‘Many Black People Tried to Pass That Test’

Frances Smith. Retired schoolteacher, Inglewood

My 21st birthday in 1952 fell on one of the few days set aside for African Americans in Birmingham, Ala. to register to vote. Under segregation, whites could register all the other days of the year.

In the segregated neighborhood I grew up in, maybe one percent of the people voted in those days. But I had just graduated from college and also, for several weeks, I’d been going to a night class at our church where a man from the NAACP was teaching blacks how to register. In those days African Americans first had to pass a long test as thick as a booklet with a lot of extremely complicated questions about history and the Constitution. Everybody also had to pay a poll tax to vote, but while whites paid $1, blacks had to pay $1 for every year they were older than 21 and hadn’t voted before. That included all the years they hadn’t been allowed to vote at all! So if you were, say, 45, your poll tax could be $24. That was a huge amount of money for blacks then, and most just couldn’t pay it.

I went to the registration place with two church friends, and the line of blacks hoping to register already stretched for blocks. Many, many of them didn’t pass the written test and had to leave. But we three passed and went into a shorter line. We were called one by one into a room with a white policeman and a white judge, who asked a lot of questions about the Constitution. All of us passed again. One of my friends that day was a retired teacher who taught Sunday School to the four little children killed when our church was later bombed during the civil rights struggle.

Many black people tried over and over for years to pass that test and vote. White policemen would watch everybody to make sure we didn’t talk to each other. But that day I saw this elderly man, about 75, trying to fill out an application. He had dressed up carefully in his suit, which was very old, and his hands were kind of trembling as he wrote. He made me think of my grandfather who’d tried many years to pass. My heart just went out to that man and I decided to take the chance to whisper to him some of the answers because this might be the last chance he’d have to vote before he died. And I was only 21, so if they caught me and threw me out I could get another chance. Did he pass? I don’t know. But I doubt it. That test was so hard even a group of UCLA scholars who later studied it couldn’t answer it all. Probably that old man got turned away again.

I don’t think I’ve missed voting more than once or twice since that day. And thinking about all we went through to get our right to vote,I make certain both of my sons vote, too. I tell them: “Doesn’t matter what else you have to do--you vote!”

*

HUGH HALLENBERG. Chairman, Disability Caucus of California Democratic Central Committee

In my life I have absolutely witnessed the power of voting and of political involvement. When I started years ago working on disability issues, people usually responded charitably and reasonably, but it was their choice. They could always choose otherwise.

Then, in 1990, several thousand disabled people converged on Washington and demonstrated for the Americans with Disabilities Act by crawling up the Capitol steps. What followed was a rare instance of Congress voting for what was right because it was right. Now people have to respond because it’s the law. And that’s very different.

But in the 1988 Presidential election when, I went to vote, my polling place in a public park was 50 feet down a steep, slippery hill after you walked 200 feet from the parking lot. Both my wife, Jane Small, and I are disabled, and getting there and back up the hill again would have been pretty impossible. But we were determined to exercise our Constitutional right. I drove our car up over the curb, down the footpath and the hill, and pulled up in front of the polling place. We got out, voted, climbed back in our car and drove back up the hill, over the curb and onto the street again. Nobody said a word. Giving credit where it’s due, I can say that L.A. County Registrar Conny McCormack and particularly the assistant registrar, Michael Petrucello, have done a good job in making polling places accessible now. I believe it’s up to 90%.

It’s important to hold politicians’ feet to the fire. They tend to see your point of view best when they’re running for re-election.

*

MAURICIO MAZONI, Psychoanalyst, history professor at USC

During the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam I was based at a landing zone near Chu Lai as a combat medic during some of the most crucial fighting. Every two weeks we’d return to camp for a short break, then go out into combat again.

A couple of years earlier I’d taken a semester off from San Diego State and gotten myself drafted. Now I was 23 years old and looking forward to voting in my first presidential election. I’d long ago sent off for a California absentee ballot because I so badly wanted to vote [in the presidential election] against Richard Nixon.

Before election day, a U.S. Army helicopter flew into our base carrying two pilots, two gunners and a ballot box. It landed. The helicopter people got off and met with the people on our base. They set up a table, a booth, and the ballot box. An MP with a gun was posted to guard the booth so no one could tamper with the ballots. Except apparently I was the only voter.

I’d already marked my ballot, so I walked from my tent past the guard, got checked off at the table and dropped my ballot into the box. The helicopter people gave me some odd looks, as if they were thinking, “You? We came all this way for you?’

After it became clear that nobody else of the hundreds of guys stationed there was going to vote, the helicopter people picked up the ballot box, got back in their helicopter and flew away.

Actually I was kind of surprised. I’d thought a lot of people would vote. Some of the officers and other guys teased me, but I felt very good that I’d voted. I just said, “Well, it’s my right.” And to this day I always vote. Well, except maybe for a few tiny local elections.

An Election That Really Mattered

JUNE PULCINI, Retired foreign aid worker, community activist, Hermosa Beach

I had always voted not only in major elections, but in every tiny election that came along--things like small city bond issues or runoffs between local candidates--where only a handful of voters would turn out. Then one year I had to go to Washington, D.C., on election day. I thought I’d be able to vote the morning I left, so I didn’t ask for an absentee ballot. But things got rushed and I had to get on the plane without voting. The election in question was the latest in a bitter fight in Hermosa Beach that’s been going on for 30 years. The fight is over how to use a stretch of land along the beachfront. One side has always wanted to use it for a park. The other side has wanted to develop it, and over the years several things have been proposed by different developers--hotels, expensive homes, etc. That particular election was so heated that when you walked down the Strand you’d see a “Vote Yes” or “Vote No” poster in every window. Even my husband and I were on different sides.

Anyway, in that election I didn’t vote, and when I got back to town I found out the side I’d supported had lost by one vote. I’ve always thought that was my vote. I was really shaken up. Now I know for a fact that a single vote really can matter.