Yes We Can! Yes We Did!

Citizen: Chatham-Southeast – November 5, 2008

103-Year-Old Proud to Cast Ballot for Obama

by Lesley R. Chinn

While the lines were long at some polling places on Tuesday, Calumet City resident Fannie Rainey, who witnessed such events that included the Brown vs. the Board of Education Decision in 1954 to integrate the schools to the Voting Rights Act in 1965, did not let that stop her from casting her ballot for Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama.

Rainey, 103, who lives at Victory Centre of River Oaks supportive living communty in Calumet City, cast her ballot at a nearby polling place. “I feel like I’m doing the right thing for this nation. It is the right thing to do to vote because I am voting for my rights,” Rainey said in an interview last Friday at her home before she cast her ballot.

“Obama seems like he is the right person to win and take over this nation and make it better. It’s in bad shape right now because you hear about people killing one another all the time. I believe he can stop some of that.”

When the Calumet City resident was born 103 years ago on September 23, 1905 in Little Rock, Arkansas:

Teddy Roosevelt was the country’s 26th present
The New York Giants won the World Series
First class stamps cost two cents
And civil rights leader W.E.B. DuBois led efforts to end segregation when he helped organize the Niagra Movement, which later reformed itself as the NAACP in 1909 to help fight against segregation.

While Rainey began voting in her 20s, there weren’t many Blacks who voted in the South. Those who did vote were required to pay a poll tax or complete a literacy test. Some even faced arrest or death threat if they attempted to vote.

“It wasn’t very nice or good, but some people voted in different places anyway. If anybody could vote, I felt I should because I was grown and had a right to vote,” she recalled.

Recognizing the sacrifices made during the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s that later led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Rainey said that there is no excuse for today’s young people not to vote. “When I was coming up, young Black people couldn’t vote.”

Now that they have that right, she added, some are not taking advantage of it like they should. “When they don’t vote, they are (doing a disservice) to themselves by not exercising their rights.”