The Vote My Grandfather Never Had

We must exercise the right our ancestors bled to bequeath us

THE VOTE MY GRANDFATHER NEVER HAD

We must exercise the right our ancestors bled to bequeath us

John Albert Washington

Had my grandfather—a black man born in the late nineteenth century—been alive during the 2024 presidential election, I have little doubt that he would have exercised his right to vote regardless of any obstacles placed in his way. Yet in an election featuring the first black female major-party presidential nominee, black voter turnout reached only 59.6 percent, compared with 70.5 percent among white voters. Moreover, 13 percent of black voters cast their ballots for Donald Trump. These figures raise an important question: while concerns about racial inequality and democratic backsliding remain legitimate subjects of public debate, should we not also engage in a serious examination of individual and collective responsibility within our own communities? I think so, particularly with respect to civic participation.

My grandfather—a big, rugged man built like a tank from a lifetime of brutal manual labor, always wearing bib overalls and a sweat-stained fedora—would have been in a state of rapture simply to possess the unrestricted right to vote. He had lived in an America where that right existed mostly on paper for black people. Yet today, with a Republican movement promising to “make America great again,” 40 percent of eligible black voters did not even bother to exercise that citizenship right, a right that generations before us suffered, bled, and died to secure.

I could almost understand such non-participation if those nonvoters had lived my grandfather’s reality, a life that ended in 1957, before the Civil Rights Movement transformed America. Though I was born in the South in 1945 and certainly experienced racism, I never absorbed the industrial-strength dose of it that he endured. But I received a glimpse of his world one day while riding beside him into town on his mule-drawn wagon. In the environment I saw that day, a trip to the ballot box could have been life-threatening.

This happened in Rutherfordton, North Carolina, around 1950. In Asheville, NC, where I lived, I knew the ordinary humiliations of segregation: separate schools, the back of the bus, racial slurs, places you could not enter, and the constant feeling of not being accepted as fully human. But nothing prepared me for that day.

I remember little about the ride into town, but the trip home will be forever vivid in my memory. Some poor Southern farmers had not yet fully transitioned to cars and tractors, so the roads still carried the occasional wagon, like my grandfather’s, or buggy along the shoulder. But there was nothing romantic about this scene—only an old, bent black man with his grandson beside him, urging a mule down the highway.

My grandfather had not wanted me to go, but as a stubborn little city kid spending the summer on the farm, I insisted until he finally gave in. By the time we returned home, I understood why he’d wanted me to stay behind.

As we passed a factory at the end of the workday, streams of white workers poured onto the highway in their cars. My grandfather pulled the wagon as far off the road as possible, but it made no difference. Horns blasted. Arms shot from car windows. Soda bottles came flying toward us.

I do not know how many times I heard, “Get out of the road, niggers!” Every shout was followed by bottles crashing against the wagon or striking my grandfather.

In those days, Southern factories generally did not hire blacks, and those white workers were not simply irritated at being slowed down. I realized later that, for many of them, tormenting poor black people walking the roads or riding in wagons was entertainment or stress relief at the end of a long workday. That was why they had all those bottles ready in their cars. They had saved them for moments like this.

The attack continued for nearly half a mile, which I thought would never end. When the bottles first began flying, my grandfather told me to crawl beneath the wagon seat. Terrified, I refused, held upright by some childish sense of dignity.

Yet my grandfather never looked at them. Never answered an insult. Never showed the slightest defiance. He sat there like Buddha in meditation, calmly staring ahead while urging the mule at a faster pace, fully understanding that even the smallest act of resistance could turn bloody. He told me that most trips passed quietly, but that day we had stumbled into some of the darker energy of the old South.

Back at the farm, my grandfather said nothing about what had happened. I excitedly told my grandmother about it, but I quickly sensed that she did not want to hear it. She was shutting it out because, for them, this was simply normal life. And they had endured worse.

Bear in mind that as a black center-left liberal, this story is not another reflection bemoaning what whites have done to us. No, it’s about our failure, as a newer black generation, to honestly examine ourselves as a people. I use our pathetic turnout at the polls as an example because too many of us are failing to take advantage of opportunities purchased at tremendous cost by those who came before us. Though the memory I have rehearsed concerns racism in the South, it is not a cry of victimhood. It is instead a challenge to the growing victimological strain I increasingly see within my own race that I think has become one of our main adversaries.

That ride into town with my grandfather took place well before the Civil Rights Movement had even begun to reshape America. The country I live in today would utterly astonish my grandparents. They could never have imagined that their grandson would live in a society that would permit him to curse back at a racist—or to strike one for throwing a bottle at him. Nor could they have imagined that, in arguably the best conditions blacks have ever experienced in America, so many of us would still define ourselves primarily through victimhood and racial limitation. Just imagine if that ride to town had been to cast a vote!

Most of all, my grandfather would have been enraged that nearly 40 percent of eligible black voters could not even make it to the ballot box, and with a black candidate on the ticket no less!

Instead of stewing in grievance or surrendering to imagined limitations, we should be charging full-speed ahead into American life and seizing every opportunity available to us. Other groups, including Asians and Jews, have also endured severe prejudice and barriers, yet they have pushed relentlessly forward. Don’t we possess that same strength? I saw it in my grandfather sitting boldly on that wagon seat, enduring an assault without surrendering his dignity.

Although black Americans formally gained the constitutional right to vote with the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, Southern states spent decades constructing barriers designed to prevent blacks from exercising that right. Through literacy tests, poll taxes, intimidation, and violence—often backed by local law enforcement—black citizens in much of the South were, in practical terms, essentially disenfranchised until passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The turning point came during the voting-rights marches in Selma, Alabama, where black demonstrators demanding equal access to the ballot were brutally beaten, tear-gassed, and jailed. The violence shocked the nation and pushed President Lyndon B. Johnson to press Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act.

Yet in Alabama itself, the symbolic ground zero of the voting-rights struggle, only 52.2 percent of eligible black voters turned out in 2024, even with Kamala Harris on the ballot. Mind-boggling. If my grandfather were alive today, his anger would not be directed primarily at white people. It would be directed at his own people.

Low black voter turnout suggests there is more than one variable behind many of our struggles. Racism is real, but some of our problems also stem from our own failures. When are we finally going to confront that honestly?

---

John Albert Washington is an octogenarian who has earned his daily bread, first, as an Army paratrooper and then, later in civilian life, as a computer support technician, two careers from which he has now achieved a double retirement. In and around these occupations, he fed his family with janitorial work, factory labor, and long-haul trucking, while also managing the completion of 2 years of college during the journey. Though he is not academically credentialed, he feels his short school life expanded his ability to think broadly and enhanced his analytical thinking skills. As a center-left liberal, he holds firmly that values like family commitment, self-sufficiency, and personal responsibility are not merely conservative but also deeply liberal ideals. He has published in Quillette and has two previous articles in the Journal of Free Black Thought: “Black Culture and the Euro-American Collective Brain,” “Blaming Racism Won’t Cut It,” “The Unraveling of the Black Family,” “The Brother War,” “‘Uplift Suasion’ vs. Dysfunctional Black Behavior,” “Pathways to Manhood: The Military vs. the Gang,” and “The Truth Is in the Mirror.” He lives in Fayetteville, North Carolina.