Dr. William Ferguson "Fergie" Reid, the first African American elected to the Virginia General Assembly since Reconstruction
While much of the media is focusing on presidential hopefuls for 2016, the state of Virginia has key elections coming up
this year—elections for the Virginia House of Delegates. A primary election will be held on June 9 and the general election will be on November 3.
A unique effort is underway in Virginia to get voters registered and out to vote, not just this year, but in the election years to come. The impetus and inspiration behind this drive is a civil rights icon in Virginia, Dr. William Ferguson Reid, known to many as "Fergie," who was the first black man to win a seat in the Virginia General Assembly since Reconstruction.
In March of this year, Reid celebrated his 90th birthday and he is still going strong. In honor of that 90th birthday and his long history of expanding voters' rights, people are committing to registering new voters for the election. This commitment is being called "90 for 90." Each person in the campaign will register 90 new voters in each of Virginia's precincts.
"If all volunteers and candidates worked together to register 90 new voters in each of the Commonwealth's precincts, our efforts would result in a quarter million new voters for the Old Dominion."
What a birthday gift that will be for Dr. Reid and for the people of Virginia!
Follow me below the fold for the details, more about Fergie, and how you can get involved (you don't have to be from Virginia).
Wills Dahl wrote an in-depth piece about Dr. Reid and the campaign for the
Baltimore Post-Examiner in an article titled
Ferguson Reid’s movement can bring change to Virginia:
It’s the cusp of his 90th birthday, but civil rights icon Ferguson Reid is still gearing up for the long haul. “We have the races in 2015, 2017, and 2019 to get the majority,” he tells me, referring to the off-year elections for control of Virginia’s state government. “And this election will determine whether or not we’re able to get a House majority for 2021.”
The Democratic political veteran seems happy and relaxed in our conversation, even as he acknowledges the challenges his party faces in Virginia. He shows an encyclopedic knowledge of his state’s history and its current crop of candidates, sounding upbeat about Democratic chances this fall despite the steep hill they need to climb in one chamber. Republicans rule the roost in the state House, where they’ve set up a firewall against Democratic Governor Terry McAuliffe’s priorities. And thanks to a computer-drawn map that’s gerrymandered the Old Dominion to within an inch of her life, the Governor’s naysayers seem secure in their power – at least for now.
"Hopefully we can find someone to run in every House seat,” Reid says. “That would increase the chance of winning.”
If a month really is a lifetime in politics, it might seem incomprehensible to lay the groundwork for the 2019 election years in advance. But Fergie Reid is used to playing a long game. He began fighting for political change in Virginia in the 1950s, becoming a voice for civil rights and integration at a time when the Democratic Party was in a state of flux. The party was torn between its segregationist roots and liberals who believed in FDR’s progressive vision rather than the ancestrally Democratic former Confederacy.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch featured Dr. Reid for Black History month in 2013:
Dr. William Ferguson Reid was at the vanguard of two pivotal events in the re-emergence of black political power in Virginia. Reid, a surgeon, co-founded the Richmond Crusade for Voters in 1956 to register and mobilize black voters during Massive Resistance. A dozen years later, Reid would reap the fruits of the seeds planted by the Crusade, becoming the first black member of the Virginia General Assembly since Reconstruction. Reid's support cut across racial lines as he garnered the most votes among the winners on the Democratic ticket. "I was glad to be elected, but I felt I was more of a symbol," Reid said in 1990. "We did it with much determination and got enough support to break the barrier." He said the election was good for whites as well as blacks because it gave whites an opportunity to be exposed to blacks who could compete with them. "A lot of whites," he said, "had not worked with blacks as equals." Reid represented Richmond and Henrico County in the House of Delegates from 1968 to 1973. He was unseated by the late Howard H. Carwile.
"Fergie" Reid was born in Richmond on March 18, 1925. He graduated from Armstrong High School in 1941 and received his bachelor's degree from Virginia Union University in 1946. He earned his medical degree from Howard University and served his internship and residency in St. Louis. Later, he became a lieutenant in the Navy. He served with the 1st Marine Division in Korea and at the Bethesda (Md.) Naval Hospital. Returning to Richmond, he became active in civic and professional affairs.
This was an era of poll taxes, literacy tests and other mechanisms to weaken black political clout. The entrenched Byrd political machine stood in defiance of change. Reid, John Mitchell Brooks and Dr. William S. Thornton began meeting daily at the old Slaughter's Hotel, a popular segregation-era gathering place for black Richmonders in Jackson Ward. The outgrowth of these strategy sessions was the Crusade. "It was obvious that the only way to get things changed was to put politicians in there who would obey the laws," Dr. Reid said in a 1991 interview. The Crusade helped guide a black political maturation that culminated with the election of the first black majority on Richmond City Council, which picked Henry L. Marsh III as the city's first black mayor in 1977.
The Library of Virginia has an
extensive interview with Dr. Reid as part of its series, "Voices of Freedom: videotaped oral histories of leaders of the Civil Rights movement in Virginia," covering his history as a physician, struggles against Jim Crow, and how he got involved in voter organizing and politics. In the interview, which took place March 21, 2003, he says:
...freedom is not free, and freedom is not eternal. What you are given one day can be taken away from you the next day. I think that the last presidential election showed that in spite of all our progress, all of the gains that we made, that in the time it takes five Supreme Court justices to put a signature on a decree, all of the gains can be taken away from you. Your one vote does count. You have to be ever vigilant. There are always problems. You think that life is fair. It's not fair. In the political world, somebody has to be the winner, and somebody has to be the loser. And in order to be the winner you have to have planned, you have to have a strategy, you have to identify what the problem is, and you are have to sit down and decide how you are going to resolve that problem. It cannot be solved in one day or one year.
And our problem is that we don't plan ahead far enough, we have to plan five years, particularly in politics. And you have to start at the base of the pyramid. Politics is based on a pyramidal, parametal system, and the power comes from the base of the pyramid, and the base of the pyramid is the political precinct. Anything you want to do politically you have to start at the precinct level and build up from that to the city council level, or the school board level, the House of Delegates level, the congressional level, the senatorial level, and then the presidential level. If you don't have a powerful precinct organization it's going to crumble. You can't start at the top and hope to work down to the bottom to be effective. You have to start at the bottom, build your base and get down to the base as quick as possible and build up from there, not only in politics, but in any endeavor you hope to do you have to start at the base and not at the top.
Dahl spoke with Reid about the potential impact of the "90 for 90" campaign:
A glance at the electoral map reveals what a game-changer this could be. If the “90 for 90” project can register the 250,000 new voters it intends to – or even achieve half of that – it could lock out Republicans from the Electoral College for good. It’s hard to see the GOP winning an electoral college majority without Virginia. And their situation is even more tenuous with the Clintons’ family friend and firm ally Terry McAuliffe in the Governor’s mansion.
“If Hillary wants to win Virginia,” Reid said, “Terry should get involved in the 2015 elections now.” The rationale is simple: Every dollar that is raised for Virginia’s 2015 off-year election, every voter who becomes registered, and every canvassing effort will fine-tune and strengthen a Democratic machine that will need to be in top form in an election where the Kochs and other GOP donors are expected to spend more than $1 billion.
And our own
Meteor Blades recently wrote about the "90 for 90" campaign in his incisive post on the necessity for us to do precinct-by-precinct organizing. He said:
Don't get me wrong. There is no silver bullet. Good candidates at every level of government for every office are a must. And we definitely have too few of those. Good policy ideas are crucial. We've got them, but it's hard to get some elected Democrats to support them. Those are problems to be solved.
But year-round, locally based organizing in each of the nation's 176,000 precincts is a crucial element for the future success of the Democratic Party. Not the party as we now know it, but one that is more progressive and more willing than it has been to fight vigorously for the economic, social, and environmental interests of the working classes that make up the vast majority of Americans. We can't wait for the party to make needed changes from the top. We've already seen what it has done with the 50-state strategy. We have to make changes from the bottom.
Alone, this locally based precinct organizing won’t do the job. But without it we’ll remain hamstrung. By locally based, I mean face-to-face, door-to-door, shoestring-funded, volunteer-driven, local organizing in every voting precinct in the nation by people who actually live in or close by those precincts. People who know the neighborhood because it’s home. I want us to leverage this local organizing into a simple goal: closing the gap between how many Democrats vote in midterm and presidential elections by 10 percent in 2018 and 50 percent in 2022.
The "90 for 90" website details how you can
get involved. You can follow the
#90For90 campaign on Twitter, and check it out on
Facebook.
Vetwife wrote an inspiring piece on Dr. Reid, and would like to see him get the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and I agree. But I'll bet that Fergie would rather see a blue Virginia ... and see that blue wash over into neighboring red states.
This is why you don't have to be in Virginia to join in. Pick up Fergie's standard and apply it to your own state.
Don't just blog it—you are gonna have to get out and slog it!
