This is why you need to vote.

This is why you need to vote.  If you surrender your rights, there are plenty of people who would like to permanently prevent you from voting.

This story is from 100 years ago, but the message still rings true.  People have died for voting.  It can happen again.

As was generally the case with lynching, the medium itself was the message. And if that wasn’t enough, there was also a sign. The note that the white mob attached to the dead body of Julius “July” Perry reportedly read:  “This is what we do to n****** who try to vote.” Hours before, Perry had been a prosperous Black landowner, a labor leader, a church deacon and a respected member of his community living out the American Dream amid the orange tree groves and sugar cane fields of Central Florida. Then, a century ago on Nov. 2, 1920, Election Day, Perry’s prosperity and the thriving existence of the Black neighborhoods of his hometown of Ocoee came to an abrupt halt.  Perry’s lynching was just the start: The white men responsible for it shot, injured and killed dozens of other Black residents, including children. They burned their houses and churches to the ground. Almost the entire Black population, up to 500 people, fled the town, abandoning their homes and possessions, never to return. The Ocoee massacre remains the worst incident of election violence in U.S. history, and the forgotten — and intentionally buried — story of how one small-town community’s exercise of its constitutional rights transformed into an episode of unthinkable racial cleansing that still has the power to shock a century later. Read the entire story here.   Read it.  Think about it.  It's ok to be angry.