This blog post was written by Jovida Hill, Executive Director, Mayor’s Office of Engagement for Women
Last October, the Philadelphia Commission for Women launched SuffrageRacePower, our year-long civic engagement initiative to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment that granted women the right to vote. Our announcement was accompanied by the screening of the documentary film “Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” A year later, we are mourning the passing of Ginsburg and the legacy of women’s rights, civil rights, and social justice that she leaves behind.
We always envisioned SuffrageRacePower as the theme for our Women’s History Month summit for women and girls, and as an opportunity to celebrate and elevate Black women leaders who were intentionally left out of the history of the suffrage movement. We also saw this as a preamble to a march to the polls in unprecedented numbers leading to the November 2020 General Election. We could never have predicted the tumultuous year that 2020 would bring us.
There was no premonition for the once-in-a-lifetime COVID-19 pandemic that laid bare the racial and economic injustice of a disease that would leave over 215,000 Americans dead and seven million people infected with this deadly virus. No nightmare prepared us for the disproportionate toll that Black and Brown people would experience during this pandemic, or the civil unrest of our nation in need of healing after the egregious deaths of George Floyd and Breanna Taylor, the latest martyrs in a string of over 400 years of violence and degradation inflicted on Black, Brown and Indigenous people.
We never expected to be eyewitnesses to the outpouring of adulation and grief as the nation laid to rest John Lewis, our patron saint of voting rights. He has left us a legacy of leading by example, imploring us to get into “good trouble.”
Nor, could we have imagined that a Vice Presidential candidate would be a Black woman who is also Asian who represents the potential of a woman in leadership, the likes the nation has never seen.
Nothing is more important today than for you to exercise your franchise. VOTE.
Here’s everything you need to know:
- Register to Vote by October 19
- City of Philadelphia Official Voting Guide
- My Vote My Way: Official Voter’s Guide of the Philadelphia Commissioner’s Office. The deadline to Register to Vote is October 19
- Committee of Seventy Non-Partisan Voting Guide
- Build Your Ballot
- Drop Off Your Ballot at a Satellite Election Office
- Track Your Ballot
Remember, you don’t have to wait until Election Day to vote. Visit a satellite election office and cast your ballot today.
