76 years old… Never voted….He’s voting this year.

Lew Frederick

76 years old… Never voted….He’s voting this year.

Perhaps the only unusual thing about this approach to the door was the fact that there was someone else already knocking on the door ahead of me. A well dressed woman, I’ll guess middle aged, got out of a mid-sized sedan just as we were leaving a note on the door of the house next door. She was clearly ready to go somewhere and had initially honked the horn to get the attention of someone inside the house. So as we walked towards the house she carefully walked up the stairs and knocked on the door. I followed her.
She was let in immediately by a somewhat gruff voice.
I quickly introduced myself and asked the man standing there if he was registered to vote at this address. He seemed stunned for a minute. Then he said, “No.”
I asked if he wanted to register to vote.
He hesitated a minute and then said, “Yes.”

I started to pull out my cards but Sue was well ahead of me with pen ready and registration card open.
I stepped back and listened to him give name, address, and phone number while I peered briefly through the door.
He had lived there a while. This was not a new address for him.
He wasn’t wealthy.
He seemed in good physical shape.
He didn’t appear to be abjectly poor.
The truck out in front was filled with what looked to be metal pieces ready for the recycling foundry.
The house was in good shape. Few things on the walls. Functional furniture.
He was dressing at the time and he had paid relatively close attention to that.
He initially asked if he should register at the woman’s address. Then decided that he would register there on 13th Avenue.
Sue asked for his age.
She asked if he had ever registered at another address.
“No.”
Sue finished.
We thanked him.
I walked away stunned. It was his birth year that got me. 1928
Here was a man, a Black man in Portland Oregon, who had never registered to vote. I guess I expected that without the overt attacks on voting someone his age would have already registered at least once in his life.

But there was more. Here was a man, 76 years old, who might not have been registered had a number of things not occurred:
• Across the street were 4 women who greeted us warmly pointing out that they were working for ACT, a concerted and successful effort to register voters across the country. Clearly crews of people had walked down the street before.
• 130 canvassers, most of them 30 years younger than me, turned out today as part of a HipHop voter registration drive to get people in a Northeast section of Portland to register.
• The original list we had was just for the even side of the street but we took over from another canvasser mid way and went to doors on the other side.
• For me, a few quick decisions placed me on 13th Avenue despite earlier plans. I had originally planned to work at home on a number of projects that had been put on hold for weeks, not canvass.
• And we met him while he was dressing to go out. Another minute or two and he would have been too busy to talk with us or gone.

And I kept going back in time to the little old ladies in Lilburn, Missouri who my grandmother used to have me read to when I was 5-6 years old. One of them was always saying that I should, “Keep that up because one of these days you’ll be able to know who to vote for if you can read like that.” She and the others made it clear that they couldn’t read yet. Though my grandmother was teaching them.
Or the sandwich board if used to wear during marches in Atlanta that said, “One Man-One Vote” in an effort to pass the Voting Rights Act.
Or the parade of faces of people signing up to vote for the first time in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and South Carolina after groups of students helped them get to the county elections office.
Or the deaths of college students and others who dared to bring the idea of voting to all people in the South and elsewhere.
Or the image brought to me by Bob Williams of the lines of people, walking for miles to sites outside their hometowns and waiting for days in line to get a chance to vote in the South African election after Nelson Mandela was released.

We heard from a lot of people today saying that this year voting was important to them. The concern and the determination were evident. It made you wonder how they would have responded 4 years ago. The younger people, the politically active, the three trustees coming out of Maranatha Church see November 2, 2004 as a pivotal time for a statement to be made. They thanked us for coming around in the middle of a Saturday afternoon. They stopped. Shook hands. They pointed out Portland connections and joked about needing help washing cars and working in the yard. But the attention did not wander… they will make a statement in November. The statements given to us, though we didn’t stress any partisan line, was that they are unhappy with the crowd in the White House and that they should be replaced. They plan to do that one vote at a time.

And there he was, a man just a few years younger than my parents, exercising his right to vote for the first time in his long life.

And I wondered whether the message of the importance of this election is what motivated him? He said that “jobs” was his main issue. He didn’t say much more. Most folks would be looking at retirement by age 76.

I’m not that persuasive. I didn’t say that much.

But something struck him as this being the day for him to step forward. I was glad to be there to witness it.

I just want to make sure he gets the ballot in when it arrives in October.

By Lew Frederick Aug. 28, 2004