Use It Or Lose It

This issue contains your Image Award ballot listing writers, actors, producers, directors, musicians and others in the arts-and-entertainment world vying for the NAACP’s highest honor. Every subscriber to The

Crisis magazine has the opportunity to influence the final selection, unlike other award shows where a small panel of judges or members of an exclusive elite make the determinations. Use your ballot and be a part of this important process.

Some 43 years ago, the Hollywood Chapter of the NAACP, under the inspi- rational leadership of Willis Edwards, con- ceived and produced the first NAACP Image Awards. The event’s purpose was to recognize and honor African American artists who excelled in film and other media and who represented the best of us in both talent and dignity.

A few years later, the National NAACP assumed production of the Image Awards, making it a national program and broadening the scope of the show. It continued to honor the highest achieve- ments of African Americans in the multi- media world of film, music, television and literature. You, The Crisis magazine sub- scribers and NAACP members, still select the winners by marking the enclosed bal- lot and returning it in a timely fashion.

As significant as your votes for the Image Awards winners are, they really pale in comparison to your vote to elect the local, state and national officials who hold your citizenship, and proof of your life, in their hands. Elected officials control every facet of our lives from birth to death: you must have a birth certificate to prove you were born, and a death cer- tificate is eventually required to prove you are no longer with us.

It was just 48 years ago in 1964 that the Voting Rights legislation was signed into law to restore our right to vote. Freed slaves had gained voting rights after Emancipation but they were taken away by vicious assaults and death threats, as well as by ridiculous voter qualification rules. Could you tell a voter registrar just how many bubbles are in a bar of soap?

Now, new attacks on our right to vote threaten to erode every right we have as citizens to determine who our representa- tives in government will be—and what rights and benefits we will have as citizens. This new sinister attack is an insult to those Black and White heroes who were mur- dered in Mississippi and Alabama and other Southern states for trying to register Black voters in the 1950s.

We must be vigilant and wide awake today. The most important election year is upon us. The right-wing assault on our rights is extremely well funded by billion- aires who are as bent on “putting” us back in our place as the white-robed night riders were in the past.

We must make sure that all of our fami- ly members who are 18 years old and over register to vote. We must be sure that our relatives and friends who are recently released from incarceration are eligible to register, and that they do so.

The 21st-century test that replaces having to know “how many bubbles are in a bar of soap” is the requirement to have “government issued” photo identi- fication. State Motor Vehicle offices in most places provide both non-driver identification as well as driver’s licenses.

Local NAACP units should petition state and city colleges to provide non- student photo identification for students’ family members who are eligible to vote but don’t have other government-issued identification.

Finally, we must begin to use our social media to alert and encourage every eligi- ble person in our circle of Internet friends and family to register and get to the polls for every election this crucial year. We must take back our cities, our states and our nation from the new Klan.

Laura D.Blackburne,
Chair The Crisis Board of Directors