I grew up in Savannah, Georgia.
Savannah is a beautiful city.
Everything about Savannah,
the flowers, the trees,
they stay green all year round
But best of all,
I like to go home where I grew up in a house,
all of my life,
this particular house.
I like because of the memories.
The memories were so special.
To see my mama and my daddy,
my sister, brother, cousins,
and friends and people who knew me before I knew myself.
When I go home to visit,
my mama and me always have a ritual,
a tea ritual.
Summer time, iced tea,
winter time, hot tea.
Well, my mama was in the kitchen,
getting the tea ready
and I went into the bathroom to freshen up.
When I walked into the bathroom,
I looked, something was so different.
It was different because on the medicine cabinet,
there were all of these stickers in the shape
of peaches that said, "I voted."
(audience laughs)
26 stickers around the mirror.
I called out, "Mama? Mama.
Why do you have these peach stickers
around the medicine cabinet?
Is that your new hobby?"
She didn't answer.
"Mama, mama, you hear me?
Why do you have these peach stickers
on the medicine cabinet?"
By this time I was in the kitchen.
And she was looking out the window.
And when she turned I knew I had hit a nerve.
You know the kind of look that your mama give you
that you know that you're in deep trouble.
(audience laughs)
By this time,
we were sitting across
from each other in the kitchen at the yellow kitchen table.
She looked at me and she said,
"No, that's not a hobby.
Those stickers mean so much to me.
They are very special.
"Oh, mama, but why are those stickers so special?"
She said, "Because every time I go to vote,
they pass out the stickers now.
And I'm not like some
of the other people who throw their stickers away.
I have saved all of my stickers
and I had so many stickers,
I didn't know what to do with them.
So I said I will place them
around the mirror on the medicine cabinet,
because every time I go into the bathroom to freshen up,
or get myself ready for today, that day,
I thank God that I can vote.
I can remember when I could not vote."
Well when she said that.
That made me feel kind of bad
because I was really teasing her about the stickers.
(audience laughs)
And I kind of dropped my head.
I said, "Yeah."
(audience applause)
She said, "Special."
My mama and daddy had a hard time voting.
They were property owners. They owned a house.
and they were qualified to vote under the Poll Tax Law.
Now that wasn't a guarantee,
because you had to pass a test.
My parents went down to the courthouse,
but they did not pass the test,
although they were very smart.
But in Georgia they had a literacy test
and if you could not pass the literary tests
with all of the trick questions,
you could not vote.
Some of the questions were so hard,
only a lawyer could answer them.
Questions like, "How many jelly beans are in this jar?
(audience laughs)
How many bubbles was in this bar of soap?"
Now, maybe you have answered maybe 30 questions,
and you answer 25.
But if you couldn't tell how many jelly beans were
in the jar and how many bubbles were in that bar of soap,
you did not pass.
My daddy was upset
because he didn't pass the test the first time.
He was in the barber shop and he heard
that Mr. W.W. Law was going to have a class
and W.W. Law was the head of the NAACP.
And my mama and daddy signed up for the course.
They went every session and they learned.
Mr. Law told them,
"We're going down to the courthouse,"
was 30 people in the class,
"and we're going to take the test,
but we're not going in as a group,
we're going in two by two."
Well, everyone in that class passed the test.
However, they never learned how many bubbles
were in a bar of soap.
As I look back on that,
when I became of age,
I said I wanted to vote.
My mama and daddy one morning got up
and they said,
"We are going to vote,
we will be back in a few minutes."
They went down to St. Thomas Church
in their green Chevrolet.
And when they got there,
the line was long
and they waited on line.
They went in and when they went to the desk that said, W,
the woman looked in the book
because they had given their cards,
and she says, "I don't see your name in the book.
Where did you move from?"
"We moved from the east side."
"Well, maybe you have to go back to Paulsen Street School
and see if your name is over there because it's not here."
Before they went on the east side,
which was a long ways away from the west side,
they stopped by the house
to see if were all right,
my sister and I
and they drove to the east side.
This happened all day.
Now mind you,
they left home about nine o'clock that morning.
They went back and forth,
back and forth.
When they were leaving,
a man came up to them
and said, "I have been watching and I am a poll watcher
from the national headquarters of the NAACP Defense League.
You go back to St. Thomas Church
and let's see what happens."
Sure enough they did.
This was late in the afternoon.
That man was a way-shower,
just like W.W. Law was a way-shower to help my people.
When they got to St Thomas Church
to the same with the same woman,
and she looked and she said,
"Oh, I must have overlooked,
here your name is right here in the book."
And they were able to vote on a paper ballot.
When they got home,
it was like six o'clock in the afternoon.
We were so glad to see them
because they had been gone all day.
When I became of age,
I was able to go to St. Thomas Church and vote.
My parents were building a legacy,
a voting legacy for me.
When I graduated from college,
I was coming to New York and my parents said to me,
"When you get to New York,
you make sure you register to vote
because that is not a gift,
that is your right.
I have voted in school board elections,
city elections,
state elections, and national elections.
But the biggest one of all was the election of 2008.
But I had an obstacle,
just like my parents had an obstacle.
At that time,
my husband of 52 years was sick.
He had Parkinson's.
Now, I knew I wanted to vote.
And I suggested to Cleve,
"Cleve you know,
maybe you could vote absentee ballot?"
And he looked at me he said,
"No, I'm not going to vote no absentee ballot.
I'm going to poll,
to the site, with my cane,
and I'm a walk in and I'm going to vote."
Well, that closed that down.
(audience applause)
That was a "ha" moment.
The day of the election we got dressed
and I said, "Would you like
to take the wheelchair just in case?"
"No. I'm going to use my cane
and I'm going to the poll." "Fine."
We got in the car and we drove to the site.
Everything was fine.
We walked into the building.
We got in the auditorium
and there he froze.
He could not move.
And I'm saying to myself,
what am I going to do?
Because he could stand like that five minutes,
10, 15, 20 until he was able to move.
As I'm standing there,
he's standing there,
these two young,
strong, black young men came over
and they said, "Pops, you havin' trouble here?"
He said, "Yeah."
They said, "What's the matter?"
He says, "I have Parkinson's.
I have Parkinson's like Muhammad Ali and Michael J. Fox,
and this is what happens.
My body closed down,
I can't move."
And they started to whisper.
They said, "We gotcha."
They picked my husband up
and they took him into the cafeteria
to the desk where the woman was sitting, the clerk.
He tried to write his name
and his name did not match the signature in the book.
So I asked her,
"Could I please initial it?"
And she said yes.
That was another way-shower.
Those young men picked him up,
took him over to the machine and placed him there
and he was able to pull the lever,
stayed in, opened it and looked at me,
"Honey, I voted."
(audience laughs)
Then I went in to the machine and I voted.
That was a wonderful moment.
Those young men picked my husband up,
took him to the car,
and wanted to know, "Were we going to be alright?"
That was another way-shower.
We got home into the driveway
and just like that it left,
he was able to walk on the porch
and walk in the house.
That night we sat up and we listened to the results
and it was just awesome.
And when they said that Barack Obama had won,
my neighbor, my block went up.
People were out in the street,
singing and clapping
and we went out on the porch,
and we stood there.
And then the phone started to ring,
calls from Detroit,
Virginia, South Carolina, North Carolina.
But the biggest one of all,
when I picked up the phone from Savannah, Georgia,
and it was my 89-year-old mother, crying.
"I lived to see the first black president
of these United States."
(audience applause)
I was crying and she was crying.
She says, "Remember, voting is not a gift.
It's a right."
That was a legacy that she gave to me,
and I'm passing it on to my grand daughters.
Now I am saving my stickers that they give
that says "NYC I Voted"
with the Statue of Liberty on it,
thank you.
(audience applause)
This started in 1948
and as far as I'm concerned,
it's going on but the biggest one of all was 2008.
(audience applause)