How a former sharecropper in an SUV helped drive Doug Jones to victory in Alabama's Black Belt.

[Cattledog]

By Connor Sheets [e-mail]
If you live in Lowndes County and are of voting age, it's a safe bet that Perman Hardy has spoken with you about voting at some point in the past 25 years.

As one of the thousands of sharecroppers who worked white men's land in Lowndes County over the years, 59-year-old Hardy recalls picking cotton after school growing up. She eventually finished her education, bought her own home, and had a successful career as a home health nurse.

But for the past two-and-a-half decades, Hardy has dedicated much of her free time to another pursuit: trying to ensure that every single person in Lowndes County shows up to the polls for every election in Alabama. A native of the unincorporated community of Collirene, she has done about as much as one person possibly could to boost turnout in the impoverished, majority-black county with a population of just 10,458 people.

"That's my goal is to make sure everyone votes. That's always been my goal. This is what I do every election," she said as she steered her forest-green Chevrolet Tahoe through Collirene, a rural area that was once home to several cotton plantations that employed generations of slaves and sharecroppers.

"We're in an epidemic poverty county so it's so important for us to vote today," she told AL.com. "I took some people today who've never cast a ballot before."

Read the entire article at:

http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2017/12/how_a_former_sharecropper_in_a.html

[TexasProgresive]

1. A true hero. We need many more like Ms Hardy to really make our country greater.