Bigger Than One: Some Reflections on "The Franchise"
by Mark Anthony Neal
Yesterday was the Democratic Primary for President in North Carolina; It was also the 73rd anniversary of my father's birth. The alignment of the two events seemed logical to me as it was my remembrance of the first time that my father voted--for fellow Georgia native Jimmy Carter in 1976--that forced me off the political fence. As a young boy growing up in the Jim Crow south, my father had little expectation that he would ever be able to vote, let alone vote for someone who looked vaguely like him. I can remember the look of pride on his face when he cast his first ballot and it was that look that I specifically recalled when I decided to support Obama back in January. And it wasn't so much about Obama--there wasn't anything inherently progressive about his politics--but that his candidacy inspired a level of investment in the political process--or "the franchise" as the old-timers liked to call it, hence the term disenfranchisement--that I had not witnessed in my life.
I celebrated the anniversary my father's birth by walking into my local polling spot, holding the hands of my two daughters, so that they could get a first hand view of participating in "the franchise". Indeed I was a little older than my 9-year-old is now when I was introduced to the political process working phone banks in the Bronx for Jimmy Carter's campaign. It was something that my 5-year-old said to me a few days ago though, that really forced me to think about what participating in the process really meant.
Watching yet another round of political ads on TV, my youngest daughter asked "daddy, are we voting for [Ba]Rock Obama?" and I immediately recalled historian Elsa Barkley Brown's classic essay "Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African-American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom." In the essay, Barkley Brown examines the voting practices of black communities in Richmond, VA after the Civil War.
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