First vote of first generation takes on bigger meaning
As young men amble by, bouncing to the rhythms of hip-hop, a woman in an embroidered African dress bends down to register to vote at a table along Utica Avenue in Crown Heights and smiles to the girl on the other side.
Damali Christopher smiles back. Her own mother was almost Christopher’s age – 20 — when she came to Brooklyn a quarter-century ago from Trinidad. Now she is a construction worker who has raised four daughters and pays taxes – but cannot vote for president.
“She can go to jail like an American, but she can’t vote,” says Christopher. “I am going to be the first one to vote.”
The community districts that include Crown Heights are three-quarters African-American; most of the older residents are legal immigrants who nonetheless can’t vote. But their children who were born here can. They represent a challenge for Christopher, one of the 30 young people who joined the “The Fifteen Hours Project,” a non-partisan voter registration campaign organized by Medgar Evers College and sponsored by local politicians, businesses and cultural associations.
According to the Migration Policy Institute, a non-profit think tank that studies the movement of people worldwide, only half of the nearly 2 million eligible black citizens in New York State voted in 2004, compared to 60 percent of state residents of all races.
“We are running into something dangerous: young people don’t believe that people died to give us the right to vote,” says Miles McAfee, the advisory board coordinator at the Medgar Evers School of Professional and Community Development. “We need to educate them.”
Armed with registration forms, guidelines to identify eligible citizens and a huge smile, Christopher, who studies mathematics at Medgar Evers, spent the day recently on the streets of Crown Heights to register voters. Her goal for the day was to register Hispanic and black men, the segment of the population that she believes are the most reluctant.
As the day begins, Christopher wants to register two friends of hers who live in Bedford Stuyvesant, and then talk to strangers on the street. She knows that many of them can’t vote, including two brothers on parole who went to jail together and a Dominican woman who has a green card but lacks American citizenship.
A few young women on Fulton Street tell her that they don’t want to vote. A shop-keeper explains that she has never voted and will never vote because has no faith that politics is going to make her rich. A young man with a shiny square earring seems interested in what she has to say, but ends up asking for her phone number.
Christopher finally manages to register her friend, Elisabeth Gonzales.
“Your vote does count,” Gonzales says from behind the counter at Pollo Pizza Restaurant on Pitkin Avenue. “I’d have registered anyway, but had no time so far, even if at times you get so disgusted with the economy.”
Enthusiasm mingles with disaffection among the young adults in Central Brooklyn. And Christopher understands some people’s lack of faith.
“‘The Fifteen Hours Project’ was my calling,” she says. “At Medgar Evers, they taught me that we change brains when we are united.”
Named after the movie “The Last 15 Hours,” about the final heated hours of Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries’ victorious campaign in 2006, the project was designed to translate art into political action. Its main focus was to spur young people to give themselves representation in their own government, McAfee says.
The campaign registered more than 2,500 voters, according to the organizers.
“Maybe the one person that I am going to register is going to make the difference,” says Christopher.
By the end of the day, she had registered 22 voters. Of them, 19 were strangers and largely women her age. But they also included an 80-year-old woman who had never before voted and a 24-year-old Orthodox Jewish man. Three others were young men from her neighborhood, guys she called “corna boys,” who stand on street corners and do whatever job comes their way.
These young men, she says, are especially hard to convince because they believe that no president will change the way they have to make money, or give them a high-school diploma.
“I tell them to look at the larger picture,” she says. “All together we hold the power to change everything.”
Christopher says that Barack Obama embodies her hope for change, the family man whom she wants to lead her country. He addresses issues such as health insurance and the war in Iraq in a more effective way than John McCain, she believes.
“I don’t like him because he is black — I believe in what he is saying,” she says.
Her family is too rich to be classified as below the poverty line and too poor to afford a family health plan. Even if her mother is West Indian and always knows a trick, an herbal remedy is not always enough, she says.
Christopher says she also worries about the massacre of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians. “Yes, I am for my country, but not for the war,” she says. She feels that as a citizen, she has the duty to vote and voting should be mandatory.
However, for Christopher there is more significance to this election because it’s her first.
“My family has no say so,” she says, “so I’m doing it for them, too.”
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