Johnson: Andrew Young fought for the Black vote; now, it scares Alabama Republicans

This is an opinion column.They voted in the rain. They voted despite a downpour that had the political neophyte pleading to God: “Why did you do this to me?”Andrew Young spent weeks knocking on doors, strategizing. He put a band on the back of a truck and sent “street dancers” throughout neighborhoods — building a campaign to win a seat in Congress. Georgia had not elected a descendant of the enslaved to Congress since Reconstruction, since formerly enslaved Jefferson Franklin Long in 1871. Young lost that race in 1970. Two years later, though, the former Alabama pastor felt confident, emboldened by his progress, by his work. By his God.Then it began to rain, rain like it had for Noah. “I was trying to get angry with God,” Young recalled in Birmingham this week. Young reminisced before a gathering of ecumenical church leaders at the historic 16th Street Baptist Church. “I said, ‘Lord, my people don’t like to go out in the rain.”His people were Black people, for those maybe scratching their heads. And he’s right. Historically, we don’t like to battle the elements, maybe because “we get our hair done,” Young said. Maybe we’re battling every day.Despondent and prepping for a second loss Young decided to explore the polls near where he lived. In the rain. What he found stirred him. “They packed the school,” he said. “They were lined up.” Then he channeled his inner Pip: “It was my rainy night in Georgia. People understood that this is my Father’s world and I wanted it to be like the kingdom of God.”Young won that seat with 75% of the black vote and an historic 30% of the white vote. The latter was “unthinkable,” he said. “No one‘s done it since.”He served in Congress for four years before resigning to become the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, appointed by President Jimmy Carter.Young has seen some battles in his nearly 95 years. He’s seen some wars, grieved some casualties. He’s the last one breathing from that tragic — now iconic — instant: He, another man and a woman all emphatically pointing toward where they believed the bullet had flown. The bullet that killed the man bleeding at their feet. Bleeding from his head on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 6, 1968.The bullet that killed Rev. Martin Luther King.Young still speaks with the fiery tenor of the pastor he once was in Marion, a rural town in the Alabama Black Belt. He still believes to his soul in the cause that has moved him since he came to Birmingham from Atlanta in 1963 and helped King, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and Wyatt T. Walker fuse the bones of the nonviolent movement that begat the Children’s Crusade, and King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail.He still believes in the cause of democracy. The cause of fairness. The cause of humanity, dignity and equal opportunity.“Democracy has broken down because we have abandoned it,” he told the Birmingham gathering on Wednesday. “We have not voted. If there had been another 10,000 people voting, we would have a different president now.”Young talked about unity, about the nonviolent boycott of Birmingham’s white businesses that ended segregationist practices. “Was white water any different from Black water?” he said. It was a strategy that changed America and beyond — that freed Nelson Mandela and changed South Africa.Were it not for the Ku Klux Klan bombings in Birmingham, for the killing of the four young girls and two boys, Young said, what happened here would have been a “bloodless effort.” Then he talked about Doug Jones, though he struggled to remember the full name of the young attorney who brought the KKK bombers to justice. Young called him “Jones” as he credited him for prosecuting the killers. The lion knew who he was talking about; he just couldn’t recall the whole name. Many of us in the audience smiled. “Jones” is now running for governor in a state that has not elected a Democrat to that seat in almost a quarter century.But Young was careful. He didn’t come to Birmingham, to Alabama, to talk about a specific race. He came to talk about this America, one that, in many ways, is as broken as the America he and others fought to change six decades ago.Young’s initial battle was for the right to vote, the right to be treated fairly, with humanity. Today’s battle, he made clear, will be won with that ballot he fought for us to wield. Without counting jelly beans, passing impossible quizzes, or being told: “Sorry, today’s not election day.” What has Alabama Republicans Halloween-scared right now, with just 25 days until midterms, is an historic turnout by Black voters. The kind of Ala-Black-ma that put Jones in the U.S. Senate in 2017.Oh, sure, they’re scared that a swell of Republicans weary of Trumpism will stay home. He wants them to pretend he’s on the ballot. I wish, truly, they would.But they’re most frightened of the Black vote. That’s why they’re running around like banshees, calling Democrats “crazy, and “socialist,” when most of them can’t intelligently define the latter. Starting with VP JD Vance, whose recent bumbling effort to define socialism will make you LOL.Or cry. Or both.It’s why they’re playing a frayed card from their battered playbook: When all else crumbles, stoke fear. Republicans want voters to fear Democrats, to see them as the they’re-worse-than-us Boogeyman rather than look at themselves - at Republican policies and how they’ve impacted Alabamians, especially their own long-loyal base. That would create true fear. Fear of an economy that is choking all of us; of low-income working families, many with elderly or children, deprived of Medicaid and SNAP benefits; of an unwinnable war that still has not been explained and has cost young American lives.They don’t want you to see a president who has enriched himself and his family to such epic depths that his day-to-day lunacy doesn’t even faze us anymore. Such that a juicy Wall Street Journal expose that characterizes the Trump administration as a bunch of cash-craving “mercenaries” engenders little more than yawns and shrugs.They don’t want you to know that our unique democracy is broken, and they broke it.The truth just may be revealed on Nov. 3, maybe even in Alabama — and that’s what scares the Chilton peaches out of them.Young stoked those in the room to ensure that each member of their respective congregations is registered to vote. He encouraged them to vote and take their neighbors with them. “When we say, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, let’s mean it, let’s practice it.“Let the Holy Spirit move you.”Even if it rains. Indeed the downpour has been so long now that, paraphrasing the popular recent AI meme: We’ve seen too many storms to be bothered by raindrops. Or stopped from voting.