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“Please do not think we think you are not important, but…”
With Monday’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration in Howardville postponed by weather, I took a look at photos from last year’s. The first is me and my friend Vannessa Frazier — the second is a letter telling voters their polling place is closing.
The letter reads: “Please do not think we think you are not important, but with only 263 registered voters in the precinct, it is just not fiscally responsible to set up a polling place…” A third of polling places were closed in New Madrid County, a county that stretches across 700 square miles.
It was another reminder that Dr. King’s fight for the democratic AND economic empowerment of everyday people is far from over. With zero public input, people were told they’d need to travel miles and miles further just to vote — as would hundreds of Vannessa’s neighbors and friends in nearby towns. Some there said that they or their neighbors don’t drive.
Howardville is a Black town in the Bootheel, with fewer than 300 people. Vannessa told me these polling place closures impacted people in nearby communities too, Republican and Democrat. Black and white. People from all around showed up at the Howardville MLK Day event to talk about how they were blindsided by this.
It reminded me of Hayti Heights, a nearby town in southeast Missouri that can’t afford to repair their damaged water treatment plant. Or Noel in southwest Missouri, a town whose existence is threatened because Tyson Foods — a company that made billions in profits last year — is closing down its local plant. Or Newtown in northern Missouri, where 13 farms are getting closed by Smithfield, a company that’s already helped put 90% of Missouri hog producers out of business. Or even the working-class communities and forgotten neighborhoods in and around our cities.
While leaders from both parties spent the last two decades wasting trillions of dollars on corporate handouts + sending us out to fight and die in Iraq and Afghanistan… States like Missouri have been getting gutted by corrupt politicians who restrict our voting rights + giant corporations who buy our elections.
Those same politicians and corporations spent all day telling us how much they admire Dr. King’s message. So here’s a quote of his I’ll leave you with:
“Now, when I say questioning the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.”
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