I FIRST VOTED in the Fall of 1993, at a little Baptist church in Concord, Alabama. I was eighteen and a freshman at Mississippi State, and had made the drive back from Starkville to cast my first ballot.
It was just a quarter mile from our house to the precinct. I walked it with my mom. We passed through the little patch of woods where my sister and I had played and ridden our bikes so many times. And even though I was as “grown” as you can be at that age, at least an adult on paper—as we walked through the woods my mom reached over and held my hand.
MY WALK THAT DAY 27 years ago was quiet and safe. I was welcomed with cheers when I went to vote after my mom proudly told the pollworkers I was there to cast my first ballot. I was brought into the act of choosing America’s direction with kindness—no one tried to stop me. I belonged there.
That hasn’t been the story for all Americans.
Selma, Alabama, 2017 (Polaroid 600)
WHEN JOHN LEWIS walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965, he was 25 years old. What were you doing when you were 25? Do you remember who you were dating? What movies you saw that year? Would you have walked into a column of armed troopers with your hands by your side? I went to see Almost Famous with my friends Jenn and Andy, and thought it was the greatest thing I had ever seen, it actually showed onscreen how music made me feel. If you were walking into a column of armed soldiers, would you have kept marching until they fractured your skull? I had a cassette of Please to Meet Me by the Replacements and would drive around listening to it, when I was 25. When he was 25, John Lewis spent two days in the hospital, after walking across a bridge.
Later he would say:
When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just—you have to speak up. You have to say something. You have to do something.
Ruleville, Mississippi, 2020 (Polaroid SX-70)
WHEN FANNIE LOU HAMER first learned that Black women had the right vote in 1962, she was 44 years old. What were you doing when you were 44? I spent a week at a conference hosted by New York University the summer I was that age. I went and saw the Yankees play the Devil Rays in a doubleheader, and let the kid of the guy next to me take some Polaroids with my camera. Ms. Hamer was shot at sixteen times after trying to register to vote. The Yanks won both games, and I got a t-shirt. Ms. Hamer was held down and beaten on the orders of a highway patrolman in Winona; she wasn’t even there to organize, was just driving through the town to get to a conference in South Carolina. I stayed in a hotel right around the corner from where Dylan and Suze Rotolo were snapped for the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, when I was 44. Ms. Hamer spent a month in the hospital.
Later she said:
Sometimes it seem like to tell the truth today is to run the risk of being killed. But if I fall, I’ll fall five feet four inches forward in the fight for freedom. I’m not backing down.
Jackson, Mississippi, 2016 (Polaroid Land Camera with Fuji film)
WHEN MEDGAR EVERS drove home for the last time to his lovely mid-century home not far off bustling Highway 49 in Jackson, he was 38. He was tough as nails, the field secretary for the NAACP in the very heart of the fortress of segregation. When Medgar met someone new, he would ask if they were registered to vote; if they said no, he asked if he could help them. When I was 38 I was planning an art show with two of my best friends. We spent so much time on it—the grueling process of editing down the show, then trying to get sequences from three different artists to harmonize together. Medgar and Myrlie Evers had trained their three children to get in the bathtub if they heard gunfire. The show was called Half Hours on Earth, after the line in that song by Silver Jews—do you know it? The Evers family were prepared for when terrorists attacked their home. Medgar was 38 when he was shot to death by assassins in the driveway of his own home.
A few years before, after being asked why he lived in Mississippi, and why he was trying to rear a family there, he said:
That’s what I want for my kids—freedom—right here in Mississippi. And as long as God gives me the strength to work and try to make things real for my children, I’m going to work for it—even if it means making the ultimate sacrifice.
YES THESE PEOPLE WERE HEROES, yes, but not comic book heroes like the Avengers, clad in chainmail and capes, but real: a living breathing man named John Lewis walked across a bridge that day in Selma, he was a real American; a living breathing woman named Fannie Lou Hamer stood her ground and insisted she would be registered to vote because she was real; a living breathing man named Medgar Evers resisted his way into reality. These heroes, these Southern heroes, created a new reality while millions refused to see them, refusing their existence, refusing their very humanity.
We tell these stories and see these parallels not so there is shame but so there can be celebration. In this great and even holy system of democracy, this delicate experiment called America, we have needed the incredible dedication and devotion of a handful of heroes to endure. And beyond endurance, we’ve needed their courage to expand, and strengthen, and bring more of us, even all of us, within the reach of freedom.
So that everyone can walk through the woods, on a quiet Fall day, holding their mother’s hand, to cast a vote.
WE KNOW THAT THE WORK IS NOT DONE—we knew it even in 1787, when some of us wrote “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union,” so we could “establish Justice”—this was a start. A grand start.
In 1963, another hero, another mighty Southerner, reminded us that we must continue to build on that beginning, that we haven’t crossed the final bridge yet—that
. . . we are not satisfied and will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.
Montgomery, Alabama, 2017 (Polaroid SX-70)
As we say in my culture, Roll Tide.
AS ALWAYS I am gorjusjxn on Instagram and you can see more of my photography at McCartyPolaroids. If you enjoyed this, please feel free to send it to friends and family.
Before I leave you, here’s one of our beautiful banner, taken with my old Spectra at the Blue & White in Tunica, surrounded by my dear friends in Due South.