Words to Vote By
November 2, 2008

Could you vote without being able to read? Technically, yes. You would be able to make marks on the ballot that would be counted, but you couldn’t read the words next to what you were marking. You would have to depend on and trust someone else to help interpret the characters by reading the material to you. That’s a lot of power to give away.

Reading is essential to every part of life. You simply can’t participate in life intelligently without it. And that includes voting.

I once volunteered with my local adult literacy program and helped teach an adult to read. My pupil, a woman in her late forties, was at sixth-grade reading level when we began. By the end of our time together she was reading at a tenth-grade level. Other people in the program, however, were functionally illiterate, that is, they could not read anything. They had learned to fake their way through life with excuses to avoid situations that demanded the ability to read. One man had even hidden it from his children for years, and I later heard that he said one of his biggest regrets was not having been able to read to his children as they were growing up.

But at some point every one of those people found the courage to apply to the program. They were tired of pretending. They wanted to read road signs and job applications and newspapers and books and ballots. They wanted to be able to read to and with their children. They no longer wanted to depend on others to help them, or to feel ashamed that they could not read.

Stop and imagine that for a moment. It will take some deliberate concentration because we who read passionately do it with no more thought than breathing. It’s natural to us. Words are worlds of beauty. They arouse, anger, calm, and soothe  us. They are bridges that allow people from other times and places to talk with us. They are our friends and it is difficult to envisage going through life without being able to understand them.

One of the most important things they do is form the foundation of democracy. What are the Constitution and the Bill of Rights composed of but words? What are ballots composed of but words? But words have also been tools of personal, societal and governmental cruelty. One of the things slaveholders feared was their slaves learning to read. And one of the most notorious uses of literacy was the so-called literacy tests given to African Americans in the south from the 1890s until the 1960s. It took federal legislation, specifically the Voting Rights Act in 1965, to finally and fully outlaw the one of the most notorious practices for limiting voting rights.

Voting rights, before the Civil War, were determined by each state because the Constitution did not provide specific protections for voting. A few northern states permitted a small number of free black men to register and vote, but state laws and practices practically limited that to white males.

Shortly after the war ended, Congress enacted the Military Reconstruction Act of 1867. Former Confederate states were entitled to be readmitted to the Union if they adopted new state constitutions that permitted universal male suffrage. In addition, the Fourteenth Amendment (ratified in 1868) granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the U.S. and the Fifteenth Amendment (ratified in 1870) provided specifically that the right to vote should not be denied or abridged on the basis of race, color or previous condition of servitude. These superseded state laws, of course, and the Force Act of 1871 also provided for federal election oversight. The result, especially in states where blacks greatly outnumbered whites meant that the majority of the eligible voting population was black.

Those who wanted to keep the status quo began to use intimidation. Terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the While Camellia were notorious for their campaigns of extreme violence, and they were aided in those by various Supreme Court decisions that narrowed the scope of enforcement of the federal laws.

Though terrorism was the  primary tool for suppressing African Americans’ right to vote, others were used:  gerrymandering of election districts, passage of state laws that allowed the imposition of poll taxes, literacy tests, vouchers of “good character,” and disqualification for “crimes of moral turpitude.” Technically color-blind but in reality applied selectively, these practices had the quieter but perhaps even more effective result of disenfranchising nearly all black citizens by 1910.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that federal legislation began to address this inequity on more than a case-by-case basis. The unprovoked attack on peaceful marchers by state troopers in March 1965 pushed President Lyndon Johnson and Congress into overcoming Southern legislators’ resistance to genuine voting rights legislation. The result was the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that, among other things, outlawed literacy tests as a way to deny or abridge a citizen the right to vote.

Though legally irrelevant to the right to vote, the issue of literacy is still very much with us. Without it people cannot be informed citizens nor can they make educated choices. There are still far too many people who cannot read or read sufficiently well to participate fully in society. Will you consider helping one of your fellow citizens by volunteering two hours of your 168-hour week to help someone learn to read? You can do that by contacting your local library’s Adult Literacy Program.

For those of you fortunate enough to be able to read my message this week is simply this: vote! It matters much less who you vote for than that you do vote. This election year is an especially critical one. Please exercise your most important right as a citizen and as a reader. Vote on Tuesday, November 4. 

Upcoming Book Festivals:
During the next week, Connecticut, Nevada, New York, and Oregon all celebrate the power and beauty of the book.

Nevada hosts the sixth annual Vegas Valley Book Festival from Thursday evening, November 6 through Saturday, November 8 in Las Vegas. Though their website is currently disabled, you can view the schedule of events here. Those events include author appearances and signings, lectures and talks, roundtable discussions, an Evening with Neil Gaiman, writers workshops, a special Spoken Word event on Friday evening, children’s activities, poetry readings, a Comics Expo, film showings and the closing night talk by Michael Chabon.  

The weekend of November 7-9 will see the popular Wordstock book festival held in Portland, Oregon. Not surprisingly, Powell’s is very much part of it but there is much, much more. Pre-festival events begin Thursday, November 6 with two events: a Superstar Poetry Slam competition, a Graphic Novel First Thursday, and poet W.S. Merwin in a special presentation. The actual fair includes more than 100 booths, 200 authors, eight stages, workshops, readings, signings, music food, children’s events, a Wordstock for Writers, Wordstock for Teachers, the incredible Night of Literary Feasts, Wordstock’s version of Live Wire!, the Text Ball, and the Oregon Book Awards. This is one book festival that promises and delivers a lot!

From 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. on Saturday, November 8, children and teens will be able to enjoy the Rochester Children’s Book Festival that focuses on them. Held on the campus on Monroe Community College, it offers not only the usual author readings and signings but a Read to Me Corner for the youngest readers, the One Busy Bookworm Place for pre-K and elementary school-age readers, a Tween Time for those between the ages of nine and thirteen, and a special Just for Teens program. 

The Connecticut Children’s Book Fair will take place over two full days at the University of Connecticut, Storrs from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on November 8-9. There will be presentations and book signings, storytelling, crafts, and storybook characters. Children will have an opportunity to enjoy the special Breakfast with Clifford, the Big Red Dog.  

Of Interest:
Hartley & Marks Publishers / Paperblanks is holding a Contemporary Book Binding Design Contest. Submissions are open until May 1, 2009 with the grand prize being 10,000 Euros. It includes all aspects of binding, visual design, and overall book construction, but is not solely for bookbinders and book artists and anyone who has skills that can be applied to book arts is encouraged to apply. 

This Week . . .
Blogs are so plentiful that it takes something unique—an remarkable focus, an unusual voice—for any particular one to rise above the majority. BibliOdyssey is one of those. “Books -- Illustrations -- Science -- History -- Visual Materia Obscura -- Eclectic Bookart” is the subtitle of this blog that emphasizes the gorgeous in illustrated books. This is an extraordinary blog for lovers of book beauty.
 
Until next week, read well, read often and read on!

Lauren