Thank you so very much

I've seen some of the larger cracks, but this was a new one for me. Thank you for posting about it.

in the system? Probably not, but I couldn't help but let that thought out.

great humor.....

Poll taxes were fairly cheap. Most, though not all, were about equal to less than $20 in today's dollars.

Most people could afford them. But try and produce the correct documents. My daughter being born in Puerto Rico had a hell of a time becuse of some scam involving Puerto Rican birth certificates. Try and find the office to pay your money to or to show your birth certificate to. Around here they have moved the office 3 times in 5 years. But we all know voter ID laws are nothing more than poll taxes. And they want to keep as few people voting as possible.

As a middle-class white person, I'm used to the notion that by the 1920's at the latest, babies were born in hospitals and so of course had birth certificates. Thank you for educating me.

My mother was born in 1916, at home. Her birth was never officially registered, and when she went to apply for a passport, she had to use her baptismal record, the family being Catholic there was good record-keeping there. Her younger brother, born in 1920, was born in a hospital.

It is so easy for any of us to assume that our experience is universal. I sincerely appreciate reminders that that's not necessarily true.

I was born in a rural Kentucky in the 50s. Mom said the office for birth certificates was only up and running a few years when I came along.

Apparently it was the problems WWII factory workers were having proving citizenship that created the push to make birth certificates more common. My mother said it was a push just like buying war bonds or donating old metal to the war effort. She said the money to set up the system in rural Kentucky came through the same program that started Social Security.

I've taken government papers for granted all my life. To realize there are black Americans younger than me who were denied a birth certificate because the county refused to acknowledge a black birth is a real eye opener.... and heartbreaking.... and quite franking makes me mad.

can substitute for birth certificates. Although the most recent census records available to the general public is from 1940. I actually had the pleasure of locating both sets of grandparents, as well as my parents from that year.

More to the point, the record keeping is enormously important. I have the appropriate records, so my life is easy. Others may not have those records, and in the current climate the lack of records is used against them. It enrages me to think that this happens. And worse, the lack of records is used as a club to beat those who don't have the records.

Somewhat apropos this topic: My husband's paternal relatives came from eastern Europe around the turn of the 20th century. One uncle, who was actually born in Poland, always claimed he was born in one of the suburbs of Boston, where he'd lived as a child, because the local county courthouse burned down not long after he was born, so he got away with saying he was born here and the records were lost. We always found that rather amusing, and in the long run it didn't matter. He grew up here, was as American as anyone else. He died about 25 years ago, so the current crap with birth certificates and so on doesn't matter to him. But it does matter a great deal to a fair number of people born here.

This is also part and parcel of the bullshit about producing ID when voting. For me it's not a problem. But for lots of others it is, and we need to understand how this is being used to suppress voting.

Here's a small joke: In 1976, on election day, I was in my psych class at my local junior college. At the beginning of class the professor looked us over and said, "As I'm sure you all know, today is election day. All of you are old enough to vote, and I hope you all exercise your franchise today. However, I want to point out that a lower voter turnout favors Republicans, so if you're a Republican, don't vote." I almost fell out of my seat laughing, and no one else in the class got it. I still treasure that moment.

too bad no one else got it.

and yet I too had not heard of this.
Thank you so much for enlightening us.

My grandmother and her two oldest brothers were born in a remote logging camp and their births weren't recorded anywhere. The oldest brother signed up for duty at the beginning of the war but had to file a Delayed Record of Birth in the town where the family was living. His mother had to attest to her citizenship (father was dead) and give details of his birth in the U.S. I found the record while doing genealogical searches.

My grandmother never did have an official birth record, even after she was receiving Social Security.

We're white, and the women in my family have had college educations when such things were unheard of. And before I left my hometown, I lived two houses down from the house where my mother and aunt had been born (and had properly recorded birth certificates, as did my grandparents, born in 1895).

This is not to say black people haven't had their documents fucked with - the opposite, in fact; that home births were fairly common in urban and rural centers among whites in the early 20th century, and those documents managed to get properly filed.

And so my education on racism now too has taken a leap.

Thank you.

Makes the voter suppression efforts all the more sinister.

So WHERE are the Democrats then? To make sure these people have the proper ID so they can vote, and help them get it if they don't??????

Your story helped me to see more clearly as well.

we are so effin' clueless about the details of what it means to be and have been black in America it is beyond disturbing.
The only mitigating factor in our racist living of our lives is that we are actually beginning to make progress integrating -albeit way too slowly- a race of people we stole and enslaved and then "freed" to fend for themselves. Other nations did not commit this atrocity to that degree, and therefore don't have this challenge.

this structural racism, and this mechanism, is used with first nations in Mexico, for example.

Many of us remember her so fondly.



Thank you, KentuckyWoman.

I had no idea what a large problem this was -- into the middle of the century and beyond.

http://facetofacegermantown.org/news/many-americans-obtaining-birth-certificate-proves-challenging-alfred-lubrano-inquirer-staff-writer/

For decades, many low-income African American women in the South gave birth in family homes instead of hospitals, aided by midwives, said Nicole Austin-Hillery, director of the Washington office of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, a nonpartisan law and policy institute. The births often went unrecorded.

Tens of thousands of babies were born off the grid, real people with the status of ghosts.

Quite often, the white establishment running records offices in the Jim Crow South weren’t all that eager to record the births anyway, Austin-Hillery said.

And, in some cases, pregnant black women were denied entrance to hospitals, historians have written.

Cuttino was probably born in her family’s home in Summerville, S.C., most likely in 1952, and was never issued a birth certificate, said Niki Ludt, director of the legal center at Face to Face, a social-services agency in Germantown. (The agency gained renown when a client, Viviette Applewhite, 94, was lead plaintiff in a lawsuit that helped defeat Pennsylvania’s voter-identification law this year.)

SNIP

That is an eye-opener!
Thanks for putting this out there.

I was born in 1958 to poor parents while they were en-route to the hospital. Because delivery was routine and they were poor they then just turned around and went home. My birth was not filed with county until 3 months later. My parents got a copy of birth certificate then, but as I later found out, it appeared that the county clerk never actually filed it officially for some reason.

My parents copy was good enough for my needs prior to 9/11, but when my driver's license came up for renewal after that, I went 4 years without any ID because the copy of my birth certificate I had carried around all my adult life was no longer acceptable - see it had been folded in my wallet and one of the folds went through the date of birth such that there was a partial hole so that the date of birth was listed as September 3?, 1958. Because the ? could not be read and because the raised seal of the state of California (my birth state) had been PARTIALLY flattened out the birth certificate was deemed by everyone (state of Michigan and US Government, and later the state of Colorado) as unacceptable. When I applied to California for a replacement birth certificate they told me there was NOTHING on file for me and that essentially I was SOL (there is now a procedure in place in CA to deal with situations like this, but it took several years after 9/11 for it to be put in place).

Essentially I had to amass everything I had that documented my life in the US - my partially illegible old birth certificate, my parents' birth certificates, my parents' marriage certificate, my school records (from nearly 30 different schools since we moved a lot), my DD-214 from my 12 years of military service, my last expired Iowa driver's license, etc and then convince a judge that I was a legal person in the US and then he had to issue a court decree saying so before I could get a new ID.

So I understand exactly what these new ID laws the republicans keep trying to put into place mean for a lot of people.

Bureaucracy should never be carried to such an extreme.

And welcome to DU!

Edit: I see that you have been around for a few years on DU. You should post more often! Your observations are valuable.

I don't have nearly those problems, but can add my own experience.

I was lax about my own records because of prolonged physical issues. Everything had long since lapsed. Also, my Social Security card had gone missing.

To get any ID that even a bank where I had an account would take to cash a check, I had to start from scratch, writing away for my birth certificate, my marriage records, etc.

It took a long time. It was a huge hassle. It involved one fee after another and showing up at one state and federal office after another. I was fortunate in that these records existed and I could afford the fees without sacrificing food or much of anything else, two blessings that many do not enjoy. I also had people willing to help, something else not always present, especially for an older person whose loved ones and friends may have passed.


Hugs to Mrs. Kennedy and to all who listen and understand.

registered until July 1917. She was white but lived in the country in the Midwest.

But then she needed her birth certificate for some reason. I think to register to vote. She sent to her birth town to get the copy of he actual certificate and that is when she found out about the delay in registering her birth. That was normal back then. Everybody knew you. The birth registration was not very important at all. She was born on a farm out in the country. Not everyone had a car then. So the delay was understandable. Especially since she was born in the winter season and the birth had to be registered in the county seat.

I realize that there may be rural people who were born in bygone eras, they still need to get their documentation to collect Social Security! Same thing applies for younger people who are using food stamps and other assistance, not to mention going to college. Having a bank account requires you have multiple forms of ID. So it's a bit of a stretch to say that someone is low-income and/or a senior and doesn't have ID. They wouldn't be able to function if so. I didn't have a bank account and ID for my 20s, though. I had one in my teens and then stopped for about a decade. However I didn't use any government assistance so it was no big deal for me.

We all need to know these stories.

until I joined the Navy. All of my brothers and sisters, 13 of us in all were born at home and not a one of us got a birth certificate when we were born. I'm poor white trash, as Steve Earle put it in Copperhead road, talking about drafting us for the killings in Vietnam.

We've been engaged in the voting ID wars for years - and I have repeatedly posted this information. By individual stories I've gathered, by broad descriptions similar to yours, etc. I'm sure others have, as well.

I was shouted down on DU quite often in the early years of the voting ID movement by far too many people who insisted the requirement was quite reasonable. It happens less frequently now that the majority of DU has come around.

But I am dumbfounded that this still seems to be new information.

and that this was a serious problem.

But the articles I had read usually talked about very elderly people, in their 80's or older.

It was news to me that even people born in the 50's or 60's (or later) might not have birth certificates.

And been providing specific examples of, in response to people who insisted it was no big deal to require birth-certificate-based IDs.

Here's a post from 2006 (it is less specific than some of my more recent posts are, but it is one I could find quickly which references the age range 50-100 - i.e. born 1906 - 1956.)

It says that as many as 13 million people, or 7% of the population, might have trouble producing a birth certificate.

http://articles.philly.com/2014-03-28/news/48634147_1_certificate-viviette-applewhite-south-carolina

or at least Cuttino is featured in an article I've posted. I can't find it at the moment, but I recognize her from the last round of voter suppression wars on DU.

Here are a few more: http://www.866ourvote.org/pages/think-getting-free-id-is-easy-think-again

Here's the research the 7% figure comes from.

She would be 101. I do not wish her back, she had terrible health problems. If she were still alive she could speak to white privilege. She never drove a car and never had a picture ID. She would get in line to vote because she always voted. She taught her three children to always vote. Would a sweet little old white lady be allowed to vote in Georgia without a picture ID?? I suspect she would and she would speak up and point out that fact to anyone who would listen. She would know it was because she was white and she would want others to know about white privilege.

She was the same woman who taught me as a child that when we got on a city bus in Atlanta if there was an available seat next to a black person that I should choose that over a seat next to a white person. I hope we did not freak out any of those black people, it was her attempt to teach me how to treat people as equal children of God.

Damn the supreme court for siding with these racists.

"The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history." ― George Orwell.

I seldom sign in here I don't get educated, this was wonderful. God bless you and Mrs Kennedy.

just before WW2, my mother did not have any papers until I was 12 and she needed a passport. Establishing her birth was complicated, time consuming, slightly costly and almost impossible in that people who could remember her birth were mostly passed away and she was born in a town that was no longer there as such....

...I always assumed that all births were equal...

I'm sort of dazed....I was raised in the south in the 50s and this never occurred to me...I'm ashamed.

He never had a birth certificate. He served in the Army in WW II.

When he needed to get a passport in the 1970's when he and my aunt planned
to travel to Europe, he had to get an affidavit from my mom--his oldest sister--who had
an FBI security clearance during WW II (I never did find out what exactly she was doing
during those years) to verify his at-home birth because she was the only surviving family
member who could attest to his birth.

it had always been an issue in rural areas and many urban areas everywhere (notably in the early part of the 20th century and before when childbirth occurred in a household). This is why in many cases, you will see births recorded in "family bibles" or (Christian) families had baptismal certificates in order to narrow down the birthdays.

There are 2 sets of laws here in the U.S. - a de jure set for everyone and an additional de facto set for POC.

I will always remember your sister for her many posts on single payer health coverage.

((Hugs))

And you sure as shit know Republicans are aware of it.

are weapons used after the civil war to prevent poor whites and blacks from joining together against the political and economic oppression supported by former slave owners and northern industrialists as they established a system of tenant farming and slave wage jobs for the poor of both races.

But we will never succeed in removing these blights on humanity until we point to those billionaires and their political hacks who now depend so heavily on these weapons to continue the hatred and division necessary to elect those politicians who stand on the side of the big banks, the multi-national corporations, Wall Street, and the millionaires and billionaires who wish to avoid their fair share of taxes.

Black Lives Matter made a good point when they said say her name. If one is really unwilling to directly name the problem, they are not going to deal with the problem effectively if at all. Our country's problem has been with us and the rest of the world to lesser and greater degree at least since Christopher Columbus sailed for the New World. The problem is that the greed of the rich is and always will be insatiable and they will take everything from others to try to satiate that greed. Yes we need to say the name. The Rich are killing us all, our air, our soil, our oceans, our health, and our freedom from financial disaster. But hey, (citizens United aside) it is not personal,it's only business.

We must stop them. We must start as O'Malley and Bernie do by boldly saying their name, and naming their sins. We must know individually how we white people have been misused to bludgeon the hopes and freedoms of black Americans and people of color around the world in confiscation of their labors, their lands, and their resources for benefit of the rich.

We must also say and one more word if we are to really focus our efforts. That word is pawns. American whites and blacks have been pawns of the rich in many, many wars. Yes we Vietnam veterans like those who join in celebration of confederate heritage want to feel their efforts and those of their ancestors were heroic and must be honored and to be really honored , the cause must have been just. We must understand that we were pawns who fought in a war not of our choosing at the direction of the rich.

Today we hear Thank you for your service, implying we actually served our country and the people of our country. We must recognize that while we fought bravely for our own lives and that of our buddies with us, we rendered no other service than to keep ourselves and our buddies alive. Anyone believing otherwise remains a deluded slave of the rich. But we must go further because we love America. We must serve her now by fighting the false glamorization of war no matter how that feeds our ego. We must make others recognize we were and continue to be abused as pawns of the rich.

Most importantly now that we have identified that the problem is the manipulation of the electorate by racial and class hate, by romanticized views of wars fought under valiant heroes who become almost Godlike, by the main stream media owned by the rich filtering and distorting the news to serve their political agenda, we must name it to others and fight it at the ballot box.

The democratic party stands at a cross roads. Do we take the path of least resistance and nominate a female candidate preferred and financed by the rich who would likely beat the clown car of republicans or do we, relentlessly and with much more opposition, move the party to say the name and choose either of the male candidates who say the name and whose views better reflect a commitment to 98 percent of our people.

I want a democrat who stands with the people. I am an American first and a democrat second. Lets nominate someone who supports the people, either Bernie or O'Malley, but certainly not a Rockefeller Republican like Hillary.

educational for those who want education....

... when those of us who suffer from Severe Melanin Deficiency* are entrusted with first-hand accounts of what life is really like for People of Color. What little we may learn is usually at some remove, such as recorded interviews or written accounts.

Sadly, the mistrust Black people have for whites is deeply ingrained, and we have earned it. But even the best of intentions can sometimes be misplaced or misinterpreted, and bridges are burned, not built.

An evening with Mrs. Kennedy was a precious gift, indeed, and it is testament to your sterling character that you regard it as such.









* White

Which shows that there is no better education than hearing it from someone who lived it.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!!

My condolences regarding your sister, and my guess is she would be proud.

I was well aware of these issues - my dad and all but two of his siblings were born at home. My dad didn't see a dentist until he was 9 - because one didn't serve the black community in his town until 1950. Crazy - right? He would be 74 this year - and so much of what the world was in c South back then had long lasting impacts on his life.

This is why I harp on voting rights - the Republicans are well aware of this concern and the sick jerks will exploit it every chance they get!

My understanding of this issue has definitely been deepened and expanded.

I wish I could publish this 'round the nation.

What a revelation.

the whole country needs to hear truths like this.

Like you, I knew that it was bad. But your post clarifies the dimensions of how bad it is.

Kept many blacks from being born In hospitals

I didn't live in the south so my education was either being given the "dots" in school or the background of current events in my younger days. From the thread I can see I'm not alone... knowing the dots but not really ever connecting all the dots.

Supper with Mrs. Kennedy helped me connect more of those dots. With another election coming and with all the discussions about race, I thought it a good time to put it out there for consideration.

Thank you for sharing.

and other contributors, for this thread, one of the most illuminating I have read on DU.