Willing 'Souls to the Polls'
ABOVE PHOTO: Rev. Al Sharpton speaks at a "Souls to the Polls." NAN rally held at Bright Hope Baptist Church last week.
(Photo by Patricia Hawkins)
The Rev. Al Sharpton came to Bright Hope Baptist Church to remind people of what can happen when they don't use their right to vote.
By Denise Clay
During the 2010 Midterm Elections, the House of Representatives switched from Democratic to Republican, making it tougher for President Barack Obama to get many of the things he wanted to do for the country done.
Part of the reason for that setback was that African Americans, a group that came out in droves to elect the President in 2008, were still celebrating the big win, according to the Rev. Al Sharpton.
"Some of you were still celebrating," he said. "But they were working. They didn't beat us; you didn't fight. It's one thing to get whipped. It's another thing not to show up to the fight. And because you stayed home, the Tea Party took over the Congress and they blocked everything this president tried to do."
In an attempt to make sure that this doesn't happen again, Sharpton and the local chapter of the National Action Network held a rally designed to get the faithful to the polls at Bright Hope Baptist Church in North Philadelphia last Thursday night.
The rally was part of an initiative among churches across the nation called "Souls to the Polls." As part of this, ministers did voter registration drives, educated parishioners to new voting laws including Pennsylvania's own Voter ID law and otherwise entreated their flocks to get to the polls on Nov. 6.
While churches in the African American community have always played a role in doing such things as registering voters, helping voters to understand laws, and making sure that voters get to the polls, that role has been scrutinized quite a bit this campaign season.
A group calling itself The Coalition of African American Pastors made news earlier in the election cycle for demanding a meeting with President Obama regarding his support of same-sex marriage. While many questioned whether or not this was the most pressing issue facing the African American community, the Coalition told reporters at a Washington, D.C. press conference that it was an issue so pressing that they were encouraging their parishioners to either vote for Republican candidate Mitt Romney or sit this election out rather than vote for the President.
But while telling parishioners who to vote for from the pulpit can lead to scrutiny of a church's non-profit status from the Internal Revenue Service, the Rev. Kevin Johnson, Bright Hope's pastor, felt Thursday's rally would pass the 501(c)(3) test.
"We can't tell them who to vote for," he said. "But we can tell them to vote."
But while Johnson didn't advocate for anyone in particular in his remarks, others did.
In his remarks, Sharpton told the crowd that in addition to giving the Tea Party a foothold in Congress, their decision to sit 2010 out emboldened Republicans enough that they felt they could change the rules of voting itself. With the goal of total power, GOP legislatures came up with laws designed to blunt the political power of the coalition that ushered in the Obama Administration; a coalition that included young people, seniors, African Americans and Latinos.
Among the toughest of these laws was Pennsylvania's Voter ID law, which was supposed to take effect with the November elections, but has been stayed by a temporary injunction. State Rep. Mike Turzai, one of the main sponsors of the bill, made news when he declared at a state Republican conference that the bill would enable Romney to win Pennsylvania's electoral votes in November.
If these well-financed, fairly extensive efforts to make it harder for some than others to take advantage of the franchise do nothing else, they should remind all of us of just how important your vote is and why you must use it or lose it, Sharpton said.
"Why would they do all of this to stop you from voting unless it was important?" he asked. "If somebody's trying to take something from you, it must be of value. If folk break in your house, they take valuables. So if any of you think that voting don't matter, why are they spending all this money to take something from you unless it matters to you?
Election Day is Nov. 6.
+ Top Story
Philadelphia officials have identified an inspector who fatally shot himself a week after a building collapse that killed six people as a dedicated 16-year veteran. Deputy Mayor Everett Gillison says 52-year-old inspector Ronald Wagenhoffer was found dead in his truck Wednesday night with a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
District Attorney Seth Williams said the scope and depth of the grand jury process will help prosecutors, the city and others to "completely and appropriately investigate" what happened when a downtown building under demolition collapsed onto a neighboring Salvation Army Thrift Store, killing two employees and four customers.
To know the Rev. Dr. G. Daniel Jones, pastor of Grace Baptist Church in Germantown, is to love him. Recently, about 700 people came to the church to show him the love and to wish him a happy retirement from the church that he's served for 31 years. Jones, 73, will become Pastor Emeritus of the church in July.
According to AAA, the summer travel season begins this weekend, when 34.8 million Americans will travel 50 or more miles from home over the Memorial Day holiday. Nine out of ten travelers will take to the nation’s highways, according to the AAA forecast released this week.
One cannot comprehend the level of danger that would lead a mother to send her child away to ensure his safety. But that is what Grace Sankoh did 12 years ago when she helped her son, Adams Kamara Daramy, flee war-torn Sierra Leone at the age of 6 to seek refuge in the United States.
State Sen. Anthony H. Williams put another solution on the table today for children in Philadelphia, offering to boost the school district’s coffers with a pair of bills that would increase the liquor-by-the-drink tax and authorize a cigarette tax for the city.
When then-Sen. Barack Obama was on the campaign trail, there was wailing and gnashing of teeth on White supremacist websites around the world due to the perception that a Black man with the power of the Presidency would enslave whites as a first official act.