On Feb. 23, the Daily Iowan Editorial Board expressed the opinion that “Voting should be made as easy and accessible — because it is a fundamental right of every American. American democracy is built on the vote, and to undermine the voting process is to undermine the founding principles of the nation.”
This reinforces my faith that writers — religious or secular — are prophets. In the religious realm: Deuteronomy 18:18, “A prophet I shall raise up for them from the midst of their brothers … And what more shall I say? For the time will fail me if I go on to relate … about them all.”
In the secular realm: George Orwell; Aldous Huxley; Herman Melville; Ray Bradbury, and so many others writing futurist “speculative fiction” or political essayists such as James Baldwin and Malcolm X. Our world is shaped by these literary prophets.
Malcolm X’s “The Ballot or the Bullet” is featured in Shelia Delany’s Counter-Traditions: The Literature of Dissent and Alternatives (1971) in which she writes: “Unlike Fredrick Douglass and W.E.B. Dubois, Malcolm X makes no attempt to imitate the rhetoric of educated white people; his primary audience, unlike theirs, was not middle-class white America but the black ghetto of his own roots; his purpose was less to explain the black man’s condition than to change it.” That background, that audience, and that purpose are evident in “The Ballot or the Bullet,” given in Cleveland in April 1964.
Throughout the essay, there is the constant refrain: the ballot or the bullet. He begins by clarifying his stance, “I’m still a Muslim, my religion is still Islam. That is my personal belief; I myself am a minister, not a Christian minister, but a Muslim minister; and I believe in action on all fronts by whatever means necessary.
“Although I’m still a Muslim, I’m not here tonight to discuss my religion. All of us have suffered here, in this country, political oppression at the hands of the white man, economic exploitation at the hands of the white man, and social degradation at the hands of the white man. Now in speaking like this, it doesn’t mean that we’re anti-white, but it does mean we’re anti-exploitation, we’re anti-degradation, we’re anti-oppression.
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“Whether we are Christians or Muslims or nationalists or agnostics or atheists, we must first learn to forget our differences. If the late President Kennedy could get together with Khrushchev and exchange some wheat, we certainly have more in common with each other than Kennedy and Khrushchev had with each other. If we don’t do something real soon, I think you’ll have to agree that we’re going to be forced either to use the ballot or the bullet.”
The DI Editorial Board posits the latest attacker on the ballot is Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, and that his claims about voter-fraud are irresponsible — imagining voter fraud is pervasive.
Much of these his outlandish voter-fraud theories arose from Obama’s 2012 victory over Mitt Romney in swing states. Winning in Ohio by 166,172; 17 votes were cast by non-citizens; the margin of victory was only 2 percentage points. In Pennsylvania a number of precincts recorded a 100 percent voter rate for Obama — this was often cited as a statistical impossibility.
I am from Philadelphia, the most segregated city outside of Apartheid Johannesburg, South Africa — Mayor Frank Rizzo saw to that. There are African-American neighborhoods in which the only light-skinned peoples are Puerto Ricans. There is no racial/neighborhood integration, yet there have been at least three-consecutive black mayors.
What explains the support for Donald Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders is people of all races, especially those formally in the middle-class, are determined it will be the ballot or the bullet. In fact, Sanders, an old civil-rights warrior, emphasizes that political revolution — the ballot, is the only road to change.
Voting is an act
of revolution.
Mary Gravitt
